Should the Codec Pack be on the repo?

[WizardStan]

It seems so arbitrary to me

Welcome to the wonderful world of software patents.

 

[thatgui]

Anyway, it sounds like having it on the repository is the way to go. As it (maybe) needs to be done unofficially, is someone going to volunteer to perform the upload?

Shouldn't we at least ask Ed before doing it (his door is beeing knocked on in the worst case) ? Maybe he is not so happy about it, or maybe he wanted to do this for a long time already, but just forgot about it ?

 

[Rockthesmurf]

Possibly, or maybe having no involvement the decision is safer for him?

 

[WizardStan]

Possibly, or maybe having no involvement the decision is safer for him?

"Better to ask forgiveness than beg permission" only works on parents, not corporations. Ideally the worst that would happen is he gets a DMCA (or German equivalent) takedown notice, but I'm not sure I would trust some lawyers to stop there.

 

[Rockthesmurf]

Well people can upload stuff to the repo which breaks all sorts of patents whenever they like. If someone does this, does ED automatically become liable? I would guess not, otherwise he would need to make sure he carefully inspects everything that gets uploaded to the repository, which I do not believe he does. Perhaps if he is specifically informed about something illegal and he doesn't act then things become trickier? It was based on this line of thinking that I suggested that him not making comment in this thread might be safer.

Anyway...

 

[WizardStan]

If someone does this, does ED automatically become liable?

I don't know about ED, being in Germany and all, but in the US he could be. That's why youtube has an automatic takedown policy for DMCA requests, because if they can be held liable for the things their users upload.I will confess to not knowing all the details and I've probably said something not quite right but that's the gist of it. I'm pretty sure the purpose of the DMCA is to give owners a little bit of leniency in this case, give them a chance to remove the offending content so that actual legal problems don't come for them, but I'm not entirely sure.

 

[Rockthesmurf]

It is of course impossible for YouTube to be able to 100% take down everything illegal that is uploaded (which is clear given the amount of illegal stuff that seems to be constantly available on it). They do however make some attempt at removing obviously illegal content, it may help on the legal side, but more importantly, it saves them time (they have to do less manual work of processing lots of separate take down requests on a per video basis, and instead try to catch as many as possible automatically).

If all else fails, we should get our repository hosted where ever it is the piratebay guys have their server (it has made quite a few moves I believe, currently in Sint Maarten according to Wikipedia) as they seem to always be one step ahead of the law 

 

[thatgui]

If someone does this, does ED automatically become liable?

Yes he does, thats called "Störerhaftung". Hard to translate, but it can be narrowed down to "if you provide a service, you are liable if this service is misused by someone else" (probably not 100% accurate, see it more as a "rule of thumb").I don't think Ed would get into big legal trouble, but he surely would have to pay several hundred euros (lawyer fees) and probably would need to give/sign a declaration of discontinuance.

 

[_wb_]

I'm not a lawyer, but I would think that there are significant differences between hosting copyright violating material, and hosting potentially patent-infringing material. It is much easier to unintentionally violate some patent claim.

If someone uploads something copyright-violating to the repo (e.g. some nintendo ROMs without nintendo's approval), they have to lie when filling out the upload form, because that form makes you declare that "You will not upload or share any content that you do not have the legal right to." If somebody uploads something copyright-violating to the repo, it will be removed as soon as it is found out that that happened - it is pretty straightforward to check the copyright status of something.

Patent violations are different, because it's much less clear cut what it means to violate a patent claim. There are hundreds, even thousands of patents that might be violated by, for example, the Linux kernel. Does that stop us from distributing it? Of course not.

In the case of something rather specific like a codec, it's easier to check that some code might actually violate that patent in some countries. But it's still up to a court to decide whether the patent is actually violated, and it's still up to the patent holder to identify and sue the one who is violating their patent. And they should go after the original source of the patent violation, and target the distributors only after it has been established that there is in fact a patent violation.

In the case of MP3, there are a lot of patent claims, but so far they have not enforced license fees on FOSS mp3 decoders.

So as a rule of thumb, I would say: take copyright violations seriously, but ignore software patent claims. Copyright and patents are really very different things. I don't think German courts even allow software patents nowadays (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_European_Patent_Convention#Germany).

 

[sebt3]

^^ so keep it the way it is ?

 

[_wb_]

^^ so keep it the way it is ?

No, just put it on the repo.

In any case it does not make any difference whether it is hosted on one of ED's servers or on the other. If anything, putting it on the repo gives ED plausible deniability of involvement if needed.

 

[thatgui]

If anything, putting it on the repo gives ED plausible deniability of involvement if needed.

Which isn't worth a dime, if things get "legal". But I guess the probability of a lawsuit isn't very high.

Anyway, why not ask ED what he thinks about it ? I could do it via PM, but maybe if someone more "prominent" would do it, an answer would be a little faster than something around a month or two..

 

[sebt3]

No, just put it on the repo.

Right. Next question : Who does it ? You ? me ? anyone else ?

 

[pmprog]

Last one to upload the codec pack is a rotten egg