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Did I just find the most retarded criminal offence in German law?
• You write a program and publish only your own source code, no binaries & no foreign code.
• You keep your code proprietary.
• Your code has an import statement referencing a foreign copyright-protected library.
That's no #copyright violation, but simultaneously, as soon as someone executes your code, you will have committed a criminal offence: Abetting of (§26 StGB) or aiding in (§27 StGB) copyright infringement (§106 UrhG).
@pixelcodeapps@mstdn.socialThat's because executing, copying or loading into RAM computer code without the programmer's permission is a copyright infringement, and infringing someone's copyright is a criminal offence. Abetting or aiding in criminal offences is a criminal offence itself.
That could possibly even apply to #copyleft – if a licence does not permit the aforementioned actions for a combined work consisting of the copyleft program and a proprietary program.
The lesson is this: Abolish the retarded special #copyright legislation for software! #FreeSoftware by default!
@pixelcodeapps has this ever been taken to court? I doubt this would hold up?!
@claudius Not as far as I know, simply because private execution of computer code is hard to prove and because copyright infringement usually isn't prosecuted as a criminal offence (lack of public interest, I guess).
However, I was told by two lawyers that, technically, there's no formal reason why it wouldn't constitute a criminal offence per se to abet copyright infringement.
It's not a realistic concern, but instead it shows how absurd the special copyright legislation for software is. 