Babe project - Legal feedback

[Nicolás Alvarez]

2018-02-03 17:07 GMT-03:00 Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org>:
> 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?".
>

As I understand it, some of these Babe features would involve KDE
servers; it's not fully peer-to-peer.

KTorrent is legal and has legal uses, and if its users use it for
illegal stuff, that's their problem. But if KDE ran a BitTorrent
tracker on its infrastructure and people used it for copyrighted
content, would we get in trouble? Even though (like ThePirateBay's
defense says) trackers don't host or distribute content, just tell
peers where the other peers are?

-- 
Nicolás