Is screenshots.debian.net at risk?
Fellow devs,
bear with me if the topic of the upcoming european copyright law (aka
§13) has been discussed in other mailing lists. As being responsible for
screenshots.debian.net I honestly am a bit worried about the
implications. As usual… IANAL.
Management summary: screenshots.debian.net is a web site that I
developed many many years ago and which is since then providing
user-generated screenshots for applications we manage in Debian.
Everyone can upload screenshots which are then moderated by pabs and me
before being published. We try to take care that screenshots of non-free
packages are not published to avoid copyright issues. And we claim to
publish screenshots under the same license as the software itself is
published. This has been the consensus after discussions on this list
~10 years ago. Screenshots can be browsed and searched at
https://screenshots.debian.net/ and are also directly linked to from a
lot of web sites like packages.debian.net or packages.ubuntu.com. The
site currently provides 8500 screenshots, has a pretty good uptime and
according to the web server stats gets a good amount of requests.
I am not only bringing this topic up because there will be a large
amount of rallies today (at least in Germany) and the topic is very hot.
The main reason is that I am working on an updated version of the web
site that will have a revised moderation workflow. pabs suggested that
we should allow all DDs to freely upload screenshots. That is already
implemented in the upcoming version and will be handled by our valued
sso.debian.net client certificates. That of course would mean that DDs
have to take care of copyright problems when uploading stuff.
A further idea of me is to allow everyone to use SSO providers like
Launchpad, Stackexchange, Google, Amazon and Github. I was considering a
system where users would have to upload a certain number of "good
screenshots" before being allowed to upload freely. I hoped to attract
more people to upload screenshots without the hassle and delay of going
through moderation. pabs and I discussed whether it's worth doing that.
Will there really be so much more user content that it's worth allowing
that?
Most of us are not lawyers so it may be hard to dig out the ultimate
truth. But I am personally worried because the server is run under my
name and I would not like to get into personal trouble while running a
platform that is providing user-generated content. Because that's what
all the EU law fuss is currently about.
I would welcome your thoughts on that. Thanks.
…Christoph
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