Michael van der Kolff <mvanderko...@gmail.com> writes: > IANAL, etc., but how about getting some legal advice on this? It seems > to me it wouldn't be nearly as cut and dried as all that; have you > examined whether or not such a scheme could be set up in such a way that > makes it a DMCA safe harbour?
DMCA safe harbor is a property of a US law and does nothing to prevent lawsuits in Europe. That's part of the complexity. I didn't say that debian-mentors would pose legal problems necessarily, only that it's not equivalent to NEW. I know that the way Debian handles NEW is fairly legally safe because it was set up that way on the advice of lawyers. I don't know if there are other ways to set this up with different requirements and a different profile that would be equally safe. I suspect that someone would need to ask. The Debian project gets pro bono legal counsel, but one of the disadvantages of that relationship is that it's very slow to get advice on specific subjects because we ask a lot of strange questions and the amount of legal advice we can get is fairly limited. I believe the DPL is already managing a fairly long backlog of legal questions, so I wouldn't be too hopeful about getting legal advice in a particularly timely fashion. The problem with all legal issues like this is that they're very much like security issues: doing things properly and doing things improperly are almost indistinguishable in practice until a problem occurs, at which point you discover you were doing things improperly. It's very difficult to distinguish between doing the right thing and being too cautious, since they both look exactly the same on a day-to-day basis (nothing happens), and very similar to doing the wrong things and just getting lucky (likewise, nothing happens). That's why people tend towards being conservative and doing exactly the same thing as was done somewhere else, since there *is* safety in numbers in legal precedent and even accepted best practice, and you have a better chance of being warned in advance by a lawsuit against someone else. Right now, my guess is that the current debian-mentors setup is doing the "wrong" thing (in that few effective precautions are being taken against distributing unredistributable material) and getting lucky, in that it's both not really a target and the people using the service are generally trying to do the right thing and any uploads of non-redistributable material is both by mistake and not of the sort of thing people would sue over. But in the current environment where nonsense like SOPA and PIPA in the US are actually being seriously considered (if, thankfully, not yet passed), it's probably worth being somewhat paranoid about things that get the official imprimatur of the project. And I'm certainly not a lawyer and this is just my guess. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87y5t2xc4w....@windlord.stanford.edu
