> They become pretty defensive when you accuse them of it.
I would too!
Kodi itself isn't theft/piracy. Kodi is a FOSS media manager that is extremely extensible. Several extensions enabling piracy have been created by third-party developers.
This may seem pedantic, but it is extremely important to differentiate between a FOSS media manager and piracy-oriented plugins.
The term "Kodi box" really annoys me because the core tools that people buy these "Kodi boxes" for are 3rd party applications that happen to execute inside Kodi's plugin system but otherwise are not affiliated with Kodi at all. They're not even included in the Kodi's official repositories.
Maybe it is time to admit that copyright is obsolete?
If crime is rampant, then there are only two possibilities: either society has collapsed and the rule of law no longer applies, or the law itself is broken, and is unjustly penalizing people for doing something that is perfectly normal and acceptable or desirable.
I'm looking out the window and there aren't cars on fire. I'm leaning towards the latter.
So called "intellectual property" needs a deep reform. It probably made sense a century ago, but it doesn't make sense today, where copying and transmitting data and ideas is so simple that it happens by accident.
As for IP owners and their "profits", I say fuck em.
Selling "copies" is an obsolete business model. The software world has already figured this out ages ago: services are where the real money is.
Netflix and Amazon are making a huge chunk of money with their streaming offerings. Microsoft's Azure and Amazon AWS are making their respective companies a huge chunk of cash. Hell, Microsoft is even giving Windows 10 (Home, but still) away for free now.
The media companies need to adapt, but greedy fucks that they are, they refused to do that. In the age of digital, they still want to sell you DVDs, CDs and physical books. Worse: the digital copies in some instances cost almost as much as the - scarce - physical copies. WTF?
So, again, fuck em. They needed to adapt, but they have been resisting change and throwing roadbloacks at every intersection, and generally, being a nuisance.
If they go down in flames, serves them right.
One of the reasons I've not bought a DVD in years and mainly stream shows now.
Stop thinking of it as paying for a physical product, and start thinking of it as a tip jar for making more stuff in the future.
Do people really want a world where the Battle of the Bastards stops so Jon Snow can tell you about how much he loves Sonos Speakers, how he uses Blue Apron, and then reads a list of Patreon supporters?
IP owners are free to set their terms and you're welcome to not purchase their content if don't agree with them. Don't get me wrong - I don't like the DRM-ridden practices of the movie industry either and wish they would copy the music industry, which allows me to buy their content DRM-free wherever I want.
I buy my music digitally, lossless for a one-time flat fee and I own the content, ready to played with any player/software I can think of. With software and games it's slightly different since there's usually DRM involved, yet there's rarely a tip jar to be seen.
Creative people can probably come up with also more subtle ways for doing this than the obvious Apple or Dell logo on computer or laptop or Pepsi can on the table. I could imagine some cross media campaigns for example which start to blur the division between shows and reality.
For more efficient targeting you could switch to airing the shows through social network sites, like Facebook and Twitter. This way you could actually tailor the products placements for different customer segments based on their profile. With the current level of computer graphics this is getting feasible. For example in sport events they are already dynamically imposing the ads on the side of the field to TV feed (so that you can show different ads to different markets)[1]