{"id":8804,"date":"2017-08-05T06:46:06","date_gmt":"2017-08-05T10:46:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=8804"},"modified":"2017-08-05T06:46:06","modified_gmt":"2017-08-05T10:46:06","slug":"tv-box-seller-emails-sky-tv-bosses-pirate-offer-gets-sued-1m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2017\/08\/05\/tv-box-seller-emails-sky-tv-bosses-pirate-offer-gets-sued-1m\/","title":{"rendered":"TV Box Seller Emails Sky TV Bosses With \u2018Pirate\u2019 Offer, Gets Sued for $1m"},"content":{"rendered":"

A man who emailed details of his Kodi-based pirate TV box offer to directors at Sky TV is now being sued by the company. Krish Reddy’s mailshot said his device offering free TV was “better than Sky” but the company responded with a $1m lawsuit instead, an amount that has the potential to rise.<\/p>\n

After relatively quiet treatment in the media, last year press in New Zealand began reporting on the booming \u2018pirate\u2019 set-top box business sweeping the world.<\/p>\n

Often based around legal Kodi software boosted with third-party addons, the devices are known for providing free movies, TV shows, and sports.<\/p>\n

Last November, \u2018My Box NZ\u2019 owner Krish Reddy, who said he would take on Sky in its own backyard with his custom streaming boxes, hit the headlines. The 27-year-old told NZHerald that \u201cit seemed like a great idea so we decided to do it ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The boxes offered some local free-to-air channels but also the all-important premium offerings from Sky, including Sky Movies and Sky Sports, an expensive proposition for an official subscriber.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy pay $80 minimum per month for Sky when for one payment you can have it free for good?\u201d Reddy\u2019s advertising said.<\/p>\n

Reddy was confident in the abilities of his product but was also confident he wasn\u2019t breaking the law.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t see why [Sky] would contact me but if they do contact me and \u2026 if there\u2019s something of theirs that they feel I\u2019ve unlawfully taken then yeah \u2026 but as it stands I don\u2019t [have any concerns],\u201d he told the Herald.<\/p>\n

As things moved on, Reddy\u2019s business really took off. He admitted to having sold 8,000 of the devices and then April this year, Sky appeared to ruh out of patience. In a letter from its lawyers, the pay TV company said Reddy\u2019s devices breached copyright law and the Fair Trading Act. Reddy responded by calling the TV giant \u201ca playground bully\u201d and denied again that he was breaking the law.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom a legal perspective, what we do is completely within the law. We advertise Sky television channels being available through our website and social media platforms as these are available via streams which you can find through My Box,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe content is already available, I\u2019m not going out there and bringing the content so how am I infringing the copyright\u2026 the content is already there, if someone uses the box to search for the content, that\u2019s what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stuff<\/a>\u00a0reports that the initial compensation demand from Sky against Reddy\u2019s company My Box runs to NZD$1.4m (US$1m), an amount that could \u201crise by millions\u201d by the time a judgment is reached.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have given us until September 24 to respond. We are not going to sit and take it,\u201d Reddy told the publication. \u201cHow many people can say they went up against a multimillion dollar giant like Sky?\u201d<\/p>\n

And it seems that Reddy is absolutely determined to fight back. Earlier this year he said that his father always encouraged him as a child to seek out the big guy for a fight, something that is now playing out with one of the world\u2019s biggest broadcasters.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Sky\u2019s] point of view is they own copyright and I\u2019m destroying the market by giving people content for free. To me it is business; I have got something that is new \u2026 that\u2019s competition,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In Europe, where these kinds of cases have already been tested at the highest level, comments like these would be extremely ill-advised and enough to give any defending lawyer a high temperature, but Reddy really doesn\u2019t seem to care.<\/p>\n

In fact, a bulk email he sent out to 50,000 people advertising his product as \u201cbeing better than Sky\u201d, actually found the inboxes of 50 Sky TV staff and directors. He believes this triggered the legal action from the company.<\/p>\n

While Reddy was on Sky\u2019s radar long before the mailshot, the blatancy of his advertising and its targets won\u2019t have helped his case one bit. Sky, for its part, is determined to get a ruling against a large player and Reddy seems the perfect catch.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone selling these boxes are within our sights. You have got to go after the big fish first,\u201d said Sky spokeswoman Kirsty Way.<\/p>\n

No case like this has ever gone to court in New Zealand so it could be important for setting the ground rules on several aspects of copyright law, including the making available right.<\/p>\n

In addition to prosecutions, Way told Stuff that it could also be possible to introduce site-blocking laws such as those already in place in Australia and the UK. These would aim to render Kodi-powered devices less effective at providing copyrighted content from unauthorized sources.<\/p>\n

Source: \u00a0\"TorrentFreak\"<\/a> TorrentFreak.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A man who emailed details of his Kodi-based pirate TV box offer to directors at Sky TV is now being sued by the company. Krish Reddy’s mailshot said his device offering free TV was “better […]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8805,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[2729,3957,3956],"class_list":{"0":"post-8804","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-world","9":"tag-kodi","10":"tag-krish-reddy","11":"tag-sky-tv","12":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8804"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8806,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8804\/revisions\/8806"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}