Copyright watchdog lets XBMC add-on SportsDevil be removed from GitHub

Copyright watchdog Federation Against Copyright Theft has taken action against the makers of SportsDevil, a popular XBMC add-on that allows you to watch pirate streams of sports broadcasts. SportsDevil’s code has been removed from GitHub under pressure from FACT.

Via SportsDevil you can watch live streams of football matches and many other sports. In particular, sports that are popular in the US, such as basketball and NFL games, are widely available. The add-on for the open source media player XBMC often extracts illegal live streams from websites that embed video images from sports channels.

SportsDevil’s code was open source and hosted on GitHub. However, the copyright watchdog Federation Against Copyright Theft has filed a request with GitHub to remove SportsDevil’s code from the site for copyright infringement. This request has been granted, TorrentFreak reports: SportsDevil’s GitHub page has since been removed.

FACT, which represents the British Premier League and Sky Sports, among others, argues that the fact that SportsDevil provides access to sports streams is illegal, despite the code itself not containing any copyrighted material. Furthermore, FACT does not rule out the possibility that in the future it will come up with similar takedown notices for comparable software. It is still unclear whether the makers behind the SportsDevil will make a new start on another website.