Amazon’s Ironical Stance: Fights and Teaches Piracy at the Same Time

• Amazon sues fully-loaded media boxes for promoting piracy while ironically selling tutorials to install them.
• Recent legal threats by ACE has created an impact in the market and made many brands leave the game altogether.
• Amazon keeps selling the other media players which could be used to stream illegal content.

Members of Alliance of Creativeness and Amusement (ACE), which includes Amazon too, have raged a war against piracy-based streaming sources and add-ons. Apparently, it is not a shocking news. We have often seen big players try to curb the piracy with the help of lawsuits and legal warnings. ACE which currently includes some of the major Hollywood studios, including Netflix and Amazon have teamed up and formed an alliance to battle piracy.
Now the ironical bit is that while the Amazon is fighting against streaming platforms which promote piracy, its retail business is selling tutorials on how to add these sources to the media streaming devices. Most of these tutorials are for beginners and are one of the primary reasons how the awareness of these platforms are spread.

The anti-piracy movement by ACE has recently created some big headlines with their lawsuits and legal warnings. This summer, several third-party Kodi developers have received threatening emails from both ACE and the other anti-piracy foundations.

This game of threatening third-party developers hasn’t gone unnoticed and triggered some major changes in the market. While some of the developers and seller have gone underground, others have entirely exited the piracy-based market.

The other thing that enticed people's interest was Amazon’s step to remove listings of fully-loaded pirate boxes from their marketplace. Collectively, there were thousands of listings that have been removed from the platform.

These fully-loaded pirate boxes were not hard to find, until recently. Dragon Box was noticeably sold on Amazon, which now, with some of the other anti-piracy players, is issuing its legal threats. In defense, Dragon Box prompted that Amazon itself authorized the promotion and sales of the device. We have checked and found that all the listings of Dragon Box have been removed. But surprisingly, one can still find a range of other piracy inducing items in Amazon’s inventory.

The loaded media boxes with preinstalled streaming add-ons are still available on the platform and are easily accessible. If you see in the reviews of these devices, you can catch many on-going conversations on how to install add-ons to illegally streaming content.

Experts believe that this kind of piracy cannot be controlled without 24/7 moderation.  Arguably, people can still buy computers and arrange media players to stream illegal content. Blocking only handpicked streamers will not solve the problem. The other major problem that members of ACE including Amazon could face is widespread of Kodi tutorials. While we know that Kodi is a legal platform, some tutorials go into the detail on how to install pirate add-ons on it to illegally stream content.

There are many other media manufacturing companies that are being sued including Set TV and Tickbox. So, on one hand, Amazon sues these media boxes that promote piracy, and on the other, it itself sells tutorials on how to set-them-up. We are not making any judgments but Amazon loses even if it wins this war, as part of the sales of these media boxes go into Amazon’s own pockets.

Do you think Amazon and other members of ACE have taken a right step by suing these media-boxes? Let us know in comments.