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Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app

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Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app

#131

Post by solarkraft »

idownvoted wrote: post #46

Here's a quick way to sweep this story under the rug: Both CEOs of the company "Culture4Life GmbH" are politically well connected in Berlin. One is a clubowner, frequently in talks with government for tax-exemptions (eg. you pay less tax if you've employ a DJ...). The other one is a member of the Green party. And we all know: Anyone who critcizes the left-wing sphere of Berlin is nothing but a racist. So there comes…

It's unfortunate the comment is inflammatory, the information contained is valuable.

Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app

#132

Post by Dirlewanger »

fsflover wrote: post #37
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been 21 years . Can we let the past go?

Yes, if you show that his opinions have changed.

Lars has admitted multiple times he was wrong to lash out when they did. Go look up interviews yourself. Metallica have fully embraced digital platforms.

Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app

#133

Post by BubuIIC »

reader_mode wrote: post #116
rostigerpudel wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People see this as an act of either carelessness or malevolence which both is unacceptable in an application that collects and stores very personal data on a large scale.

I think you have unrealistic expectations of applications developed for public sector - I'm usually surprised if they do core of intended functionality correctly.

This isn't a project developed for the public sector really. Afaik it's a privately funded, for profit, product that has been licensed by several states in Germany by now.

Apart from that the official (indeed publicly funded) Corona-Warn-App did a much better job at this. (They actually did follow all the recent best practices in software-develoment + it's (mostly) run as a free software project, taking community contributions seriously, reacting to feedback and issues, etc.)

Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app

#134

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

I get the impression that copyright infringement on permissively licensed works is more the norm than the exception these days. It seems like most popular JavaScript libraries are MIT licensed, but it seems lost on the users that the MIT license requires attribution, something I rarely see on a lot of highly interactive websites that are almost certainly redistributing attribution-required code.

It would be interesting to see if one could make a bot that could detect minified versions of popular libraries and see what the compliance rate is.

Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app

#135

Post by hnbad »

berkes wrote: post #130
hnbad wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, but I feel like we should apply different levels of scrutiny to some small project and an app developed by people with close ties to government officials who received literally millions of Euros in public funding to develop and license this app. This isn't even a GPL violation as the code in question was licensed under a BSD license. They simply removed the original copyright notice, which may have been…

I am not familiar enough with BSD, but would it not be a licence breach, when you alter libraries with a BSD licence and redistribute those in a closed-source app? At least with GPL that would most likely be the case. If so, regardless of their "accidental tooling removing the copyright notice", they would be violating that copyright. Also, IANAL.

Oh, I'm not saying what they did wasn't illegal (tho IANAL, so I can't say whether this would indeed be considered copyright infringement and warrant damages in Germany). I'm just saying that forgetting that your autoformatter strips license comments when you copy permissively licensed third-party code into your codebase is a different level of impolite than using copyleft licensed third-party code with no intention to adhere to the copyleft restriction.

Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app

#136

Post by junon »

tastroder wrote: post #108
ramboldio wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't get where the outrage is coming from. Some mailinglist?

Mostly general distrust in the project by the German tech scene on Twitter. Their marketing comes with weird "trust us" vibe and the German tech scene went through these conversations already with the concept of the official app. Add to that their attempts at transparency which are often a little too late and vague, and you have internet outrage. (With this release for example people were expecting to see server-side…

Germans hate "trust us" mentalities anyway. That's why Google Street View is exceedingly rare here.

Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app

#137

Post by luckylion »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #110
Mordisquitos wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could always establish a minimum-living income that was immune to fines based on ratio of income, or consider specific expenditures to be protected from the calculation (e.g. rent or cost of travel to work). However, I can see how that could eventually lead to the truism becoming "If the penalty for a crime is an income-ratio fine, then that law only exists for the middle class, and not for the lower or upper cla…

I've often wondered whether penalties should target reputation more than they do, which would affect all classes of criminal including upper class. For example, as part of the sentence for violent crimes, the government could mail official press releases about the crime to all households in the area periodically for a certain amount of time after the conviction, or put up signs, at the criminal's expense (with a gove…

I do believe that the shame-feeling part of society is generally less likely to commit crimes. That is, it would work on them, but it wouldn't work on someone who does not care what their neighbors think of them.

Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app

#138

Post by nix23 »

vinay427 wrote: post #50
nix23 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, why should we? US Troops still sit in Afghanistan and Iraq, that's also ~21y.

I would suppose that more appropriate examples abound. Remaining in those countries today indicates that the action is not just in the past.

>Remaining in those countries today indicates that the action is not just in the past.

Depends who is responsible for the actual "action", specially looking at Iraq.

Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app

#139

Post by kingofpandora »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #36
heckerhut wrote: post #13

Oh the irony. The LUCA app has been co-initiated and financed by Smudo [0], a famous German rapper. He was a supporter of Metallica suing Napster back in 2000 for copyright violation [1]. [0] https://www.chip.de/news/Kontaktverfolgung-mit-Luca-App-von-... [1] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Smudo-vs-Napster-Da-...

It has been 21 years . Can we let the past go?

How many years does he want copyright to last?

I'll let things go after that much time has passed.

Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app

#140

Post by jkaplowitz »

surfsvammel wrote: post #123
jkaplowitz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered whether penalties should target reputation more than they do, which would affect all classes of criminal including upper class. For example, as part of the sentence for violent crimes, the government could mail official press releases about the crime to all households in the area periodically for a certain amount of time after the conviction, or put up signs, at the criminal's expense (with a gove…

I see what you are getting at. Do you think it could go a bit overboard though? That it makes people kind of take the law into their own hands?

There's a risk of that, yes. As I said, the details need tweaking. It would be especially helpful for wealthy, powerful, and/or corporate criminals who are probably paying for good private security regardless of their criminal record/sentence or lack thereof.
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