Breaking: TVAddons Loses Canadian Appeal; Domains Remain Seized

A Canadian judge has ruled in favour of Bell, Videotron, Rogers, and TVA, denying TVAddons from receiving its original domain names and social media accounts back.

Today, February 21st, 2018, TVAddons received notice from an appeals court in Montreal that ruled in favor of media giants Bell, Videotron, Rogers, and TVA. The ruling means that TVAddons will not receive access to their original domain names and social media accounts until the conclusion of a pending bigger legal battle. The news is a setback to TVAddons, who were originally awarded their domains back for being seized unlawfully during an Anton Piller search warrant executed on the TVAddons founder.

 

The Appeal

The court did not test any of the claims brought forward by Canada’s media cartel, which claimed that community based platforms (such as TVAddons) are responsible for the actions and content uploaded by users of the service. The court ruled that the claim alone is reason enough for seizing the domains. This ruling implies that under Canadian law, there is no safe harbor protecting community based platforms from abuse by web visitors.

The appeals panel had to consider whether the original judge made errors when he vacated the Anton Piller order and whether he made errors when he dismissed the application for an interlocutory injunction. Bell, Rogers & co challenged the judges finding that infringing addons offered by TVAddons represented just over 1% of all add-ons developed by TVAddons, and the appeals panel agreed that the statement was misleading.

 

Other Details

Justice de Montigny, who presided over the appeals ruling, shared a few other details surrounding the case and the Anton Piller order executed in the summer of 2017. Contradicting an earlier statement, the judge said that the TVAddons owner was informed of his right to remain silent and was also told that he could refuse to answer questions other than those specified in the order.

The Kodi community has speculated about a detail in the original report that a list of Kodi related names were placed in front of the TVAddons owner for more details to be given. De Montigny clarified today that the purpose for these names was to expedite the questioning process. He also noted that the respondent did not provide material information on the majority of the aliases put to him. He provided no other details.

Consequences

In addition to keeping old TVAddons domain names seized, the telecom companies were awarded costs of $50,000.

The news hurts TVAddons chances of communicating with followers of their former domain email list and social media accounts as they raise awareness for their court cases in Canada and the USA in Texas. TVAddons has said that they will fight these accusations of hosting content that displays copyrighted content. Court costs were previously estimated at over $200,000 to fight the cases.

TVAddons will continue to operate under it’s new tvaddons.co domain, considered a new entity.

Click here to read more information on the latest developments and to donate to the court fund for TVAddons if you choose to.

 

We want to reiterate that no Kodi addon hosts any content, legal or non-legal. Kodi addons are a search engine into the public internet and only return media files found on the public internet. You can manually go and query Google the same way that Kodi addons to. Kodi developers do not control content on the internet.

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