Babe project - Legal feedback

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dissabte, 3 de febrer de 2018, a les 21:26:24 CET, Nicolás Alvarez va 
escriure:
> 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?

That's much more of a dark gray area and I would strongly advise KDE having 
anything to do with servers involved in that.

Cheers,
  Albert