Kodi addon ZemTV and popular Kodi addons library TVAddons have suffered a hefty legal blow, after an appeal to have a lawsuit against them dismissed was denied.
American satellite and broadcast provider Dish Network took them to court last year, accusing them of copyright infringement. The case was filed in a federal court in Texas.
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TVAddons owner Adam Lackman is based in Canada, while ZemTV developer Shahjahan Durrani is based in the UK.
The legal team defending both ZemTV and TVAddons argued that, since “Lackman and Durrani have never been residents or citizens of Texas; they have never owned property in Texas; they have never voted in Texas; they have never personally visited Texas; they have never directed any business activity of any kind to anyone in Texas … and they have never earned income in Texas,” the case should be dismissed, TorrentFreak reports.
However, Dish argued otherwise, and successfully managed to use TVAddons’ own data against the site.
“The United States was Defendants’ largest market with approximately 34% of all TV Addons traffic coming from users located in the United States, which was three times the traffic from the second largest market,” the company argued. Judge Vanessa Gilmore ruled in favour of Dish last month, and the legal battle is now set to continue.
In April, TVAddons delisted a multitude of popular Kodi addons, including Exodus and Covenant, both of which can provide free (and illegal) access to a huge selection of TV shows and films.
“We are no longer indexing certain types of addons as a result of legal pressure. This doesn’t mean that you can’t install whatever you’d like, it just means that we can’t index those addons through our platform,” it said at the time.
“Right now we’re only indexing Kodi addons from which content licensing can be ‘easily’ verified. We’re not saying anyone else is bad, we just can’t be part of it.”
Do you think this will all end in tears for TVAddons and ZemTV? Share your thoughts @TrustedReviews.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
