EU policy/Copyright 2019 and FlightGear

[bugman]

Personally I do not have an issue with this. I receive the FSF emails, so I know their concern. But, in this case, I have never been convinced by their arguments:

FSF Blog: Free software is at risk in the EU -- take action now

No argument presented (in the media) by any EU citizen (or anyone, anywhere for that matter) has ever seemed convincing to me.

Regards,
Edward

[bugman]

And I think it should be added that Thorsten and some other people here got a lot of criticism for their tight, rigid and maybe annoying enforcement of the terms of sharing content - i.e. having the correct permissions to do so - but we really should be thanking them for it because if it ever came up in a legal proceeding it could be clearly shown that;

a) this is non-profit, and
b) a clear and consistent effort has been made to comply with existing copyright legislation.

I think this community is completely safe thanks to people like Thorsten.

Quoting entire posts is normally eliminated by the admins and moderators, but I would like to strongly reinforce what Lydiot has said here!

And I would like to add that everyone, as a contributor to this forum, can help the FlightGear project protect itself. If you see someone contributing content and it is not obvious where it comes from or If that person created it themselves - just ask "where did you get that from?". Seasoned contributors will instantly be able to answer this. If the response is suspicious, or the contributor cannot or will not identify the source, then the content will in most likelihood not be legal.

Note that there is a lot of trust involved in our checking - for example using names who have contributed to this thread, legoboy's and it0uchpods' contributions would be highly trusted in comparison to a new forum user, as they have demonstrated their knowledge of the copyright issues.

Regards,
Edward

[Hooray]

The "upload filter" thing is completely irrelevant in this context - it's a legal precaution, i.e. to reduce liability - apart from that, such a "filter" can obviously never work 100% correctly - it can just go through a list of heuristics or call a bunch of web services handling that, and return a boolean true/false - the development of an all-encompassing "upload filter" would easily exceed the complexity of the whole FlightGear code base.

This is really only being done for liability purposes - and there is always going to be an infinite number of ways to trick the upload filter.