JDownloader Worries about Court Ruling
JDownloader Court Ruling Worries Open Source Software Developers
Posted: 30 Jun 2013 http://torrentfreak.com/images/jdownloader.jpg Downloading files from the web can be achieved via many routes but for some a download manager is the best solution. One of the most popular is JDownloader, a Java-based tool that works on Windows, Linux and Mac. Among other features it can download videos, pull files from countless file-hosting sites and finish things off by automatically extracting them. This week JDownloader found itself at the center of a controversy when news broke that the Hamburg Regional Court had banned the software. That statement turned out to be a little overbroad and was soon corrected, however the problem was still fairly serious. The Regional Court had ruled against a feature present in an earlier beta (not official) version of JDownloader 2 which enabled the downloading of copyrighted and protected RTMPE streams. The Court decided that this represented a circumvention of an “effective technological measure” under Section 95a of Germany’s Copyright Act. As a result the Court issued a preliminary injunction against JDownloader2 and threatened its makers, Appwork, with a 250,000 euro fine for “production, distribution and possession” of the Open Source Software. Quote:
As outlined by Alex, the feature to download RTMPE streams wasn’t created by AppWork, tt was a third party tool that in its newest version also made the download of RTMPE streams possible on top of being able to download regular RTMP. This update of the third party tool was added to JDownloader 2 by an open source developer. Quote:
But despite Appwork itself not creating the feature, the Court is now holding the company responsible, a situation which Alex believes is comparable to any Internet site being held responsible for the actions of its users. Quote:
The next hearing in the JDownloader case is scheduled for September. |
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