Re: Quake is GPL
On Sat, Dec 25, 1999 at 10:00:41AM +0100, Christian Kurz wrote:
> Hm, I don't think that the FTP-Maintainer should really take care
> about this, because they are also not lawyers and I'm not interested
> to ask my lawyer for every program on the server, if it's legal or
> not. If I set up an mirror, I want to mirror the whole stuff and let
> the author/maintainer of those stuff make sure, that everything is
> legal. So I think the suggestion of Raul is a good solution for both
> sides.
Well, the ftp maintainer and the mirror maintainers would have to to
implement any sort of "distributed distribution" solution. [And, it
occurs to me that German sites, if they had problems, could simply exclude
from mirroring and package which has the name of a problematic package.]
The only "master" server in Germany is the non-US site, so the only
requirement for packages legal in the US but not legal in Germany is
that they do *not* go on non-US. The German mirror maintainers can take
action to prevent mirroring and quake data libraries (if they feel that
this is an issue).
It would be polite to inform them of this issue (given German persecution
of the Compuserve guy for Compuserve content). [It was Compuserve,
right?]
And, more practically, no one is an expert on all the laws of all
countries. The best we can hope to do is react to suggestions that some
package has some legal problem in some country.
On the positive side, few countries are so totalitarian that they'd
punish someone for removing content when it's suggested that the content
is illegal.
--
Raul
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