Selling ‘fully-loaded’ Kodi STBs now illegal in the EU

Streaming copyrighted material for free on multimedia players such as Kodi is illegal, the European Court of Justice ruled.
Downloading pirated copies of movies, music, and television shows has always constituted copyright infringement, but streaming the same content was previously a legal grey area. Now the EU Court of Justice has ruled on the matter. The full verdict can be downloaded here.
The ruling will now make it possible to sue sellers of so-called ‘fully-leaded’ Kodi boxes, who offer access to illegal streaming services for a monthly or yearly fee. Kodi is completely legal, it is a neutral, open-source media player that can be installed on a broad range of devices, from set-top boxes powered by Android, to known brands, such as the Amazon Fire TV Stick.
Because of this illegal use of Kodi software, Kodi has for some become synonymous with piracy. The Kodi development team has now issued a statement about this ruling: “The team is, frankly, quite pleased with this decision. As we’ve said in the past, pirate box sellers are a real problem for users, because they provide users with constantly breaking messes, vanish, and then expect Team Kodi to provide support to users who are confused about what Kodi is, where their “free movies” are coming from, and all of the issues related to this problem. We don’t have any problem with users setting up their boxes however they want. We just want them to actually know what they are getting themselves into when doing so.
“We are also not particularly worried by this decision. There are definitely some slippery slope arguments to be made about what can constitute a “communication to the public” in the future, but the court seems to have made it quite clear in its ruling that they view Kodi itself as something akin to Firefox or the internet, perfectly legal, while the links/add-ons specifically are the illegal IP.”
In a related development, research by Sandvine has shown that in the US 70% of all instalked Kodi software is used to access illegal streams and on-demand content, and that the sellers of “fully-loeade” Kodi STBS profit most.