On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 8:35 PM Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
I do think that the amount of effort that the project puts into this
pre-screening is of sufficiently high magnitude that it would be
worth
paying a lawyer for a legal opinion about whether or not we need to
do
it. The savings to the project if we found out that we didn't, or
that we
could do something simpler and more easily automated, would be more
than
the cost of the legal opinion.
+1
Looking at the last financial numbers I found [1], we have at least
~750k USD we could use for this purpose. I don't really know how
expensive lawyers are, but I doubt that this would cost more than 10k.
Heck, we could even hire two lawyers without any significant financial
impact (maybe in the US and EU as I think these are probably the most
prominent areas for potential copyright lawsuits), even if it costs
50k.
IMHO that would be totally worth it. And instead of investing scarce
man-hours into pre-screening, we could create a money pool for
financial support in case there is a copyright lawsuit. The
pre-screening in NEW doesn't prevent someone from claiming copyright
infringement anyway, there is just a smaller chance that the lawsuit
is justified. But sadly even winning a lawsuit can still cost a
significant amount of money.