[LAU] A weak link in the license chain: Releasing on false assumptions?

[Hartmut Noack]

Am 30.06.2010 13:19, schrieb Paul Davis:
> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 7:13 AM, Nils Hammerfest<nils at hammerfeste.com>  wrote:
>
>> Now what happens? Of course the intial release was wrong and there will be legal consequences, no question. But what about the derived works and their derived works?
>
> there is no single answer to this. it would depend on national laws
> (which vary) and it would depend on the particular case at hand. there
> are examples i can imagine where in US law, the derived work would
> immediately become as illegal as the initial work, but the
> distributor(s) of the derived work would not have any liability.
> there
> are other examples i can imagine where they clearly would.
>
> --p


In Germany the recent situation is: if you have made a derivative work 
in "good faith" you have to stop to distribute your derivative as soon 
as you learn, that the initial work is not made legally. There is a 
thing called "Mitstörerhaftung" that could be translated to 
"Responsibility for helping others to do illegal things without being 
involved in such illegal activities directly and without having intended 
to do so". As soon as you are informed about such activities on your 
website or in any other thing you distribute you have to respond within 
48h. If your response is to stop such distribution immediately and 
inform the involved parties that you have done so, you have a very good 
chance to be out of trouble. BUT! this is custom, NOT written law. 
Especially you are not completely secured from costs that come with a 
lawsuit.

Another much more delicate point is the *information* you may get by 
reading code that a proprietor has not allowed to be distributed. Say, 
it would be a media-player that can read a certain type of file-format. 
If you know, how such a format can be decoded, you could write your own 
code from scratch, that is capable to read such files as well.

And if such code is illegal or not, is not ultimatively decided yet.

best regs

HZN