In a surprising turn of events, jsergio123 has announced his return to the Kodi addon community, promising to bring more legitimate content with him. In case you haven’t heard of him before, jsergio123 is best known for maintaining our URLResolver during our short downtime last summer. Unfortunately, his friendship with some of the people behind Covenant resulted in copyright bullies paying him a home visit, resulting in his abrupt retirement from the Kodi scene back in November. Since then, he mostly remained in the shadows, contributing some legitimate code here and there, occasionally tweeting his views on the Kodi community.

We are not aware of jsergio123 having been involved in questionable addon development in recent history, so the fact that he is promising to bring more legitimate content to Kodi is quite in line with what he’s done in the past. One thing we are interested to see is his new ResolveURL plugin, a fork of our URLResolver dependency. Since the cease and desist order he received in November forbid him from maintaining a list of addons which included the legitimate URLResolver, it seems he had no other choice but to create an entirely new dependency which he hopes will not be used for illicit means.

We’re glad to see jsergio123 back and will be keeping an eye on his development. We also hope to port segments of his new ResolveURL dependency back into URLResolver at some point in the near future.

Please find a redacted copy of part of the cease and desist order he received in November, for those who are interested:

It appears that some Kodi addons have already migrated the new ResolveURL, to that we say the more the merrier. We do however hope that he has thought ahead and plans for the potential legal battle that could follow, the movie industry already knows his identity, meaning it wouldn’t be very difficult for them to drop a lawsuit at some point in the future.