Personally can't see how the seller has a leg to stand on, advertising the boxes specifically to receive paid TV for free.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37474595

Already being discussed here

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2180455

Sale of fully loaded Kodi boxes may be made illegal

Possibly, but we'll have to wait to see what the trial verdict is and whether there's a subsequent appeal.

Is there a case to be made for the Android Play Store being liable for allowing these apps to be available?

Vanilla (and cross platform) Kodi is free and lawful to use - it's the third party additions that are the controversial ones but that's beyond the Kodi developers' control.

Kodi is available as a native application for Android, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, and Windows operating systems, running on most common processor architectures. A small overview of the features can be found on our about page. For each platform, we offer a stable and development release(s). For normal users we recommend installing the stable releases.

Yes I know. I was asking about these third party add-ons being available through the Play Store.

Sorry, I see now. I would be very surprised if any of the controversial third party add-ons were to be found in any of the official app stores for any of the operating systems. For example, I just checked in the Ubuntu and Lubuntu Software Centers (Linux) and there were zero add-ons of any sort for Kodi.

Neither kodi or the add ons are available via play store. The add ons are installed through kodi itself.

KODI is on the Play Store and so are forks of it such as SPMC.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....kodi&hl=en_GB

The addons aren't in the form of applications (.apk files) so they wouldn't be on Play Store anyway.

Didn't realise that Kodi was on there, haven't checked for a while. I guess its part of the reason Kodi team are really trying to distance themselves from the add-ons.