[tahoe-dev] The Liability Question.

[Yaverot]

--- stercor at gmail.com wrote:
|> Are we liable?

Depends on who you mean as "we" (and to whom).

1. People creating software that provides useful functionality, that while it can infringe has significant non-infinging uses.  Should be good in the US, "Sony Betamax ruling" also Grokster: http://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/  "We" are providing a useful tool for secure online backups, with a "healthy distrust" of the actual storage providers.

2. People running the Tahoe service.  DMCA safe harbor should be good if "we" don't advertise it for illegal purposes (again see Grokster).  However, to be DMCA compliant we have to be able to respond to takedown notices.

I realize that most on this list are probably in both groups.  
I am not a lawyer, when I've heard lawyers talk about such issues (similar by my layman's PoV) none of them have been my lawyer.*


|> The phone company is never thought to be liable if people do bad things using their lines.
|> But, the phone company has lawyers that have helped settle this issue in their favor.
|> I do not believe we have such resources.

Phone companies are also required to provide phone taps to legitimate authorities.


|> One issue that is not clear is when suspicious material is stored on Google Docs.  I don't know what they (or the law) would do in such a case.

One of the good points of the DMCA is that the service provider doesn't need to police user-generated content.  Because even Google can't watch all of what they accept to Youtube each day, much less every email that gmail handles, or what is put into Googledocs.  And even if they could, it would be an unreasonable burden to verify that each and every person who handed data to Google was either the original creator, had a valid license, or was within fair-use guidelines.  And for better or worse, the courts want to keep the decision of fair-use in their hands, by refusing to give some "bright-line rules" so the courts only need to deal with the edge-cases.


And those answers was "liable" to copyright holders.  If instead you mean liable to the users as a service provider...

*And the lawyers were generally talking about what would probably happen instead of what should happen, because of evidence rules, and the quirks of California or Texas law, or what may or may not be "bad facts".

DMCA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act