*sigh*

qwerty12, you know that's not the case here.

I can understand: what does a "new" maintainer do here? Ship the propietary stuff?

For example, I could bring in the following argument: "Should I just upload the entire of Theme Hospital to extras non-free? Application X does it!!! Why shouldn't it???".

Where do we draw the line? I'm somewhat OK with the calculator ROMs cause TI "sometimes" knows better, but I really doubt EA will let the previous flagrant violation of copyright go ahead.
(Note: as maintainer of CorsixTH I can tell you I don't plan to do it ).

If we just don't draw the line, suddenly a menacing letter will someday come to m.o's (or worse, Nokia's) door -- and then we will all panic like just a few months ago when the entire emulator story happened. Only that then we will have a way more dubious defense.

Exactly, it's a problem of where to draw the line, and the only clear place is between legal and illegal, regardless of whether a specific legal threat exists.

Too many people want to argue based on their feelings on the law rather than the (sometimes unfortunate) reality of it.

I stopped respecting most laws, the moment I realized that you can just pay a politian to do what you want. But I tend to be bitter about money and humanity in general.

But that's my own personal opinion. For the purposes of this thread I largely agree with Texrat. It's more a concern for the maemo.org community, then anything else. Which is now funded by Nokia I believe, but not owned by it?

Your always welcome to start up your own community to talk about where to acquire things, and host your own repo if you don't like maemo.org policies. The policies are just to safeguard the maemo.org community afterall.

Not quite, as that's considered "taboo", too. http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ch/025482.html and http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ch/025450.html are fun reads.

What has the zeemote to do with creating your own repository?

Nothing at all, but it seems that "Ask for removal of some packages from Extras Fremantle repository" is in the same thread.

That's easy: if the copyright holder's licence terms allow redistribution of the bits in question then redistributing those from maemo.org (or anywhere else for that matter) is fine. If not, those bits should be removed.

I think that we are making an elephant out of a mosquito-esque issue. Wheter we agree with copyright laws (in this day and age I will be the first to call them BS) or not doesn't really matter - putting copyrighted material in the repositories opens a door for a legal action against maemo.org and that surely cannot be a good thing.

It's a non-issue really. Out of legal concerns copyrighted material (that the copyright owner didn't give us permission to distribute) should not be allowed in the repos, as simple as that. However, that doesn't mean that the end users have to suffer by doing the things manually and to search for compatible required ROMs by themselves. To make it easier for the end users:

1) We can have a wiki page explaining where to get the ROMs, with links and all that, and leave it to the user if he/she wants to break the (arguably stupid) law. Emulators can then point to such a page, if they depend on external ROMs (like BIOSes and such), should they not find what's required and let the users deal with such legal annoyance. Having a page with links to the copyrighted/illegal material cannot be prosecuted by any copyright law I am aware of, and such two-step apporoach is user-friendly enough while not endangering the maemo.org community.
2) Or even simpler, each emulator can come with an additional package that will contain the links to such files and a small dialog window why they are required to download ROMs from 3rd-party web sites and let the users agree to download (potentialy) illegal material. If the users agree, the emulator can easily pick up the required files defined by links in that additional package, and put them in the required directories the same way as it would be described on the previously mentioned wiki page. Think of such package similar to weather site providers for OMWeather.

The only reason why it should be in a separate page or package is due to the shear fact that copyright owners can take a legal action against sites that host their copyrighted material without their consent in which case links would have to be updated with new locations and you wouldn't need to rebuild and upgrade the main emu package just to get those new links.

I really think that we are making an issue of something that can be so easily avoided with such two-step process. Without it we are actually creating a much bigger issue - namely where does it stop - if you can put copyrighted material in the repos without copyright holders permisson, what stops you to put in, for example, the Sygic navigation app? From a legal point of view, those two are exactly the same thing.

Just my 2¢...