By Chris Brass
Writer
I’m an admin for a Plex support group on Facebook, and recently we had an individual join our group who said that they purchased Plex from eBay. Of course this raises several red flags. No doubt the major attraction to cord cutting is that it saves money and seeing the ability to stream several movies and TV shows, many which have recently been released on Bluray provides a great deal of appeal to individuals, but if you are purchasing Plex, an essentially free service, it falls under two categories.
- Illegal: Depending upon the material that such a service makes available to you, it’s likely violating several copyright laws. Federal laws prevent you from breaking encryption on home media and while it’s unlikely that you would be prosecuted for home personal use, breaking encryption on DVD’s and Bluray discs so that you can sell access to such material is a blatant violation of existing laws.
- Scam: Some of these are scams designed to take advantage of ignorance. While eBay may offer some protection we have been getting information that some of these sellers have been gaining access to other individuals servers and selling access to them. Early last year an issue came to our attention where an individual found out that the account that was being sold provided access to his server without his approval and permission. One of the features for Plex is the ability to share your server. As stated in previous articles I created a Plex account for my mom then granted her permission to access my server from her home. Some individuals were coming into our group and creating fake Plex accounts and fake Facebook profiles then selling them on eBay. Within days of the item being sold, those individuals who granted access to their servers would find that multiple unknown IP addresses were gaining access to their servers and they would quickly remove them from their list of shares.
Don’t buy these subscriptions, not only do you risk being taken advantage of but you also risk having Plex being associated with piracy in much the same way that Kodi has been having a negative effect on legitimate users.
