No subscriptions. Just type in the name of a blockbuster, and start watching a high-definition stream in seconds.

If you really believe it's that easy to get a quality HD stream then you've never used one of these boxes.

Paid alternatives like Netflix and Hulu made it easier just to pay up.

Then along came the media companies with increasing prices and everybody wanting their own streaming service and ruined it all with too many $10 monthly charges.

"We saw these piracy addons starting to take off, and we realized they were very simple to use," says Nathan Betzen, XBMC/Kodi Foundation President. "It looks so easy to use these things that we wanted no part of it.

But we had no problem building our name on the backs of them.

And for all the focus on piracy, the majority of addons facilitate perfectly legal features,

I feel like this gets lost a lot in the "news" over all these addons, 99% of them are legal.

"You don't even need to have this high technical bar. You just need to have some business savvy and some ethical greyness in your life to go into the business."

It was not so easy my mother could do it... so it's not that easy for a lot of people.

"We're basically taking the stance that if you use the word 'Kodi' to mean something other than the vanilla software we release, if you preinstall addons or something like that, that means you are no longer shipping Kodi, and we consider it a trademark violation," says Betzen. "That's sort of worked. We've been able to get a bunch of sellers off of Ebay and Amazon that way."

That would be like Microsoft saying that once you add software to your computer that it's no longer Windows.

More specifically, the suit alleges that while TickBox TV may not come preloaded with infringing addons, it funnels customers directly to them.

So, they sell a box with no infringement on it, making them what liable for what the user does with the box, that's bullshit and an overreach of the copyright laws.

noting that of over 1,400 addons in his community, only 18 were identified as infringing. TV Addons

Again a little over 1%... and TVAddons had a DMCA policy and would have removed them if sent a request.

"These lawsuits by big TV incumbents seem to have a few goals: to expand the scope of secondary copyright infringement yet again, to force major Kodi add-on distributors off of the Internet, and to smear and discourage open source, freely configurable media players by focusing on the few bad actors in that ecosystem," wrote EFF lawyers Jeremy Malcolm and Mitch Stoltz recently.

Seems about right, big Media gets spooked and starts tossing billions of dollars around to get new laws or to reimagine existing ones. I'm still waiting for the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension of 2020 to come up.

"I think the only solution is going to be the solution that made torrenting less popular, which is to provide the services that the pirates are providing in a way that's better."

This, Netflix was great, then it started losing tons of stuff you wanted and replacing it with lower quality stuff or just not bothering to replace it. We went from it's always there to it's going to leave Netflix in x months but we can't tell you what x stands for because contracts.