Kodi is an amazing multimedia hub, but it seems that the project is being used in some nefarious way. Developers intend to enforce the trademark in order to protect the good name of the project.

Kodi (former XBMC) is the best multimedia hub available right now, and it's free and open source. This makes it the perfect solution for some companies to offer with their hardware. There are quite a few media boxes out there that offer Kodi as default, but not everyone has good intentions.

The problem is that there are many people and phantom companies that build various media boxes, use Kodi to power it, install various add-ons that are usually related to piracy and which stop working, and then disappear.

As you can imagine, this puts Kodi in a bad light in two ways. First of all, Kodi is seen as something used to promote piracy, even if this is something that users choose to do. Secondly, when the add-ons that are installed proved to be broken or to compromise the security of the users, the blame falls onto Kodi, even if they had nothing to do with it.

Trademark must be enforced

Online stores like eBay or even Amazon are full of these small PCs that run Kodi and that are actually promoting access to pirated materials. The only way to stop them, or even try to stop them is to enforce the existing trademark.

The term trademark might hold a bad connotation, but it's useful in this situation. The Kodi team has the trademark for XBMC and Kodi, and they can enforce it.

“This means we will issue trademark takedown notices anywhere we think the likelihood for confusion is high. If you are selling a box on your website designed to trick users into thinking broken add-ons come from us and work perfectly, so you can make a buck, we’re going to do everything we can to stop you,” developers wrote on the official website.

The Kodi team needs the help of the community to find all of these sellers, YouTubers, or people that make a bad name for Kodi. Takedown notices will be sent. Not all of them will stick, but at least, they might make a dent in this worrying trend.