Babe project - Legal feedback

[Andy B]

On February 3, 2018 at 1:08:06 PM, Albert Astals Cid (aacid at kde.org) wrote:

El dissabte, 3 de febrer de 2018, a les 18:07:27 CET, Camilo Higuita
Rodriguez
va escriure:
> Hi,everyone
>
> I'd like to discuss something with the community, and maybe get some
legal
> input:
>
> As some of you might already know I'm working on a open online platform
to
> share music information between users, such as public playlists, comments
> on tracks and on the playback progress like soundcloud, share popular
music
> suggestions, metadata, and discovery of new music from another users with
> integration with YouTube and Spotify etc... the platform will be
integrated
> into Babe music player and could be use in any other music player
>
> The legal matter comes here:
> 1- I would like to either have the option to *stream live* the music an
> user is currently listening to to a group of friends. here the music file
> isn't being storaged in the audience computer...
> How ilegal is it? How illegal is to stream live, but privately,
copyrighted
> music? and how illegal is it to stream owns music content to a selected
> group of friends?
>
> 2- If the stream part wouldn't be enought problem, I'd also like to sync
a
> user playlist marked as public to some other friends, that would mean to
> share music files between users, and technically downloading another
users
> music files. How illegal is this part? how illegal is to share a music
file
> for example, in a conversation in telegram or whatsapp, or even how
illegal
> is it to send a mp3 to a friend over an email or even over google drive?
>
> I'd like to get feedback about this issues.
>
> As the project is going to be hosted by the KDE community this streaming
> part won't be implemented to avoid legal issues, but however I would like
> to have this discussion to get as many feedback as possible.

I am not sure you're approaching this the right way.

For me it doesn't really matter if users can do illegal stuff with our
software, what matters is that the software is legal and that it has legal
uses (see KTorrent).

What I think you should be asking yourself is "will I/KDE be in problems
for
shipping this sofware?" more than "can my user pontentially get in trouble
for
using my sofware to do illegal stuff?".

Cheers,
Albert

>
> Thank you.
>
> Camilo





That’s what I was thinking as well. It’s not that you have to be licensed
to have the ability to stream music. Music files are the copyrighted
content, not the software. Copyright is also different for each of those
files. What you do with your own files is up to the owner of those files.
But you can’t be docked for having software with the ability to stream.
Take for example, VLC, it has the ability to present video to the user and
they just say they are not responsible for the kind of content played in
their player.

On the other hand, let’s say that you were the provider of music, this
music came from your own personal collection, and you offered streaming
through a software, then you should pay royalties. But that is not the case.

I say, make Babe feature full, as much as you want.

Andy,
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