German Court: Open Source Project Liable For 3rd Party DRM-Busting Coding 178
Diamonddavej writes "TorrentFreak reports a potentially troubling court decision in Germany. The company Appwork has been threatened with a 250,000 Euro fine for functionality committed to its open-source downloader (JDownloader2) repository by a volunteer coder without Appwork's knowledge. The infringing code enables downloading of RTMPE video streams (an encrypted streaming video format developed by Adobe). Since the code decrypted the video streams, the Hamburg Regional Court decided it represented circumvention of an 'effective technological measure' under Section 95a of Germany's Copyright Act and it threatened Appwork with a fine for 'production, distribution and possession' of an 'illegal' piece of software."
Does the copyright need an owner? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it legally possible to author and licence an opensource project without disclosing your identity? All the licences I've see have a place for the copyright holder (the person or other entity that is granting the rights detailed in the license). I presume its possible and legal to do this without including your actual name right? If you don't care about getting credit for it (or suing for damages), you can avoid this potential liability by having the project copyright controlled by some nameless entity. As long as you don't need to re-licence it in the future, I think that is safe.
I suppose you could have the copyright in some arbitrary name (your friend's dead pet, whatever), but still require the license to credit you. A lot of opensource projects really don't care who holds the copyright, so if its a liability, the developers shouldn't hold it. GPL type projects have to be careful, since the copyright holder could use it themselves however they want, or reissue it under some other license. This approach makes much more sense for permissive licenses like public domain, or MIT/BSD.
Re:Does the copyright need an owner? (Score:5, Interesting)
Open source licenses use copyright.
Only the owner of a copyright can enforce it.
If somehow copyright would be assigned to a non-existant entity, nobody could enforce it and it would effectively become public domain.
Re:"effective technological measure" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"effective technological measure" (Score:4, Interesting)
German speaking guy here. You're absolutely right, I have the exact same opinion, but they really use this "wording" (sorry if I didn't get that expression right). It's stupid. I believe that it is written like this deliberately. So they can use any $drm scheme, doesn't matter how cheap, it could be as cheap as, any 12 year scriptkidde can circumvent it, if it says $drm, you can be sued for the circumvention of it. Or the other possibility is, they really just have no idea. Maybe they compared drm to the physical world. Burglers can smash in your window just like that, enter your house and steal everything of value/easily movable. Doesn't mean they couldn't be sued for it, because security doors + windows are an effective counter measure against burglars.
good decission (Score:4, Interesting)
Hamburg Court (Score:5, Interesting)
he Hamburg Regional Court decided
You can stop reading there.
This particular court is the laughing stock of the german legal system, and its decisions are routinely overturned at the higher courts. They are famous for "creative" interpretations of the copyright laws.
Source: I live in Hamburg, Germany and I've been following copyright-related civil rights matters for more than a decade.
Ok You Clowns Here is the scoop. (Score:4, Interesting)
I ran Wireshark on it and it does not do the ET phone home crap that most spyware does so it is what the writers say it is.
If you boot it up and do not leave it in the sys tray it does not leave active processes hanging around. HOWEVER you can run it as a background process to snoop your RTMPE and have them automatically download the vids. On youtube it downloads the whole smash including the webM html5 streams and all available vid size pieces of a vid including any mp3 or other audio files.
Best stream ripper out there IMO. EAT MY SHORTS MPAA, RIAA and all your ill begotten drm bullshit nonsense. This video is a great one and as a result I will order her works online she is one hot guitarist! Fantasia la Traviata [youtube.com] a little beyond the reach of most musicians, eat your heart out if you like guitar!
Re:"effective technological measure" (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm pretty certain that by "effective" they mean "something that is in effect", not "something that is very good at its function".
Re:"effective technological measure" (Score:2, Interesting)
No. Obviously German courts are free from US precedent and could theoretically use a layman's definition of "effective" but it's likely that the US lobbyists who wrote the German law, had their shit together and knew how German courts would interpret that word.
In the US, we had the matter of "effective"'s meaning settled way back in the DeCSS case. It doesn't mean what you think it means. It means what they want it to mean, and judges have agreed. That battle is over (or at least until people start taking an interest in their governments and bother to vote against Republicrats).
Don't ever buy (or subscribe to) DRMed content or things that are nearly dedicated to working with DRMed content. Every dollar you spend on DRM, will have a large fraction used to keep the government corrupt, and keep laws like DMCA from being repealed. If you know someone who is thinking of buying a Blu-Ray player or an Xbox or an iPhone or a Roku in the next couple weeks, try to talk 'em out of it.