Earlier today, TorrentFreak reported that Tickbox came to some kind of mutual agreement (authorized by the court) with the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) which requires them to immediately erase Kodi addons and other apps from internet connected Android boxes located in the homes of their customers. While we’ve never been a fan of Tickbox (or any box sellers for that matter), we are quite disturbed by the fact that the court would order a private corporation to secretly delete software from devices owned by American citizens, without their authorization.

We can’t say that we didn’t see this one coming. When the billion dollar movie industry comes down on a small business owner or developer with all their might, there is not much one can do to fight back. It is no surprise that those who operated businesses selling software that was meant to be free, would then turn around and do whatever they could to save their own asses. Copyright bullies want to make an impact that will scare away other in the future, and nothing scares away users more than having their devices wiped clean remotely.

As of the current time, nothing has been proven to be infringing in court. Essentially, Tickbox seems to have agreed to remove any Kodi addon or app which the movie industry claims to be infringing. The court has ordered the plaintiffs to deposit $50000 USD to protect Tickbox in case the injunction is reversed, but what about the customers in all this? Who is going to protect the interests of individual American consumers who bought these prices at highly inflated pricing?

We find this quite concerning, since the court has not yet to be afforded the opportunity to actually assess the legality of the apps or addons which are being ordered removed. It is likely that more than one non-infringing will be remotely deleted, simply because a bunch of copyright bullies who will do anything to destroy the Kodi community, claims them to be infringing. We’ve heard of servers being ordered shut down, but ordering the remote deletion of software from a user’s computer without their consent? It begs the question, what are they going to order remotely retrieved from user devices next?

We’ve never actually seen a Tickbox device, so we can only speculate as to how they might remotely remove apps or addons. If you want to protect your home from being digitally invaded my outsiders, you’ll want to disable automatic updates within the Android Firmware Updater and Tickbox Updater. We’re not sure if it exists, but if you see a Tickbox repository within Kodi, disable that too. In the worst case, you can always reinstall Kodi manually in the future and reconfigure to your own specifications.