What is or isn't a business from a legal point of view strongly differs from what you might perceive as a business. I have ads on the page. There are kits being sold from where I get small provisions. I also sometimes do custom solution development. This page and anything OctoPrint related is therefore going to be considered as commercial in nature under German and European law, just as much as e.g. Tom's channel is considered commercial.
As I said already, moving this outside the EU is not going to help here in any way thanks to the GDPR, it's merely going to allow me the choice between what I want to get sued for if this stuff goes through - pest or cholera, what will it be? I live in the EU and in Germany. I have to abide by their laws. And I'm not going to move away from my friends and family just to be able to run an open source project full time. I already risk a whole ton by doing this full time (don't get me started on the muddy waters that is the whole taxation of the various kinds of income associated with running OctoPrint that make up my livelihood and the constant pressure and fear if something out of my control happens, like Patreon going belly up or whatnot).
People who don't live in the EU or have looked at being self-employed in the EU telling me "This should not be a problem" and "Why don't you just move/hand over control to third parties/try to circumvent law in this or that obvious way" is NOT helping here. This is a very real threat, even if you don't want it to be, and I'm not going to risk getting sued into oblivion. If this becomes the law, I will have to abide by it, with all the downsides of that, period. Suggesting to somehow work around or outright break it is a fairly poor suggestion.
The point of this topic is to spread awareness that this is happening. If you want to discuss which union is better than another, please go into that elsewhere. If you want to split hairs with me on whether I would risk getting sued or slammed with cease and desists from lawyers specialized just in that which run rampant here - don't. Just be glad that apparently where you live things are easier for self employed people who happen to run websites.
So explain what is being uploaded here that is commercial that they can go after and sue for?
Logs from Octoprint from people looking for help aren't commercial software.
Neither are screen shots of error messages etc.
If people are uploading copyrighted software, then those individuals need dealt with... and that applies in ANY country
Any picture or log zip could potentially be a copyright violation since it might not be a screenshot but a fotograph, or not logs but some audio book. The problem isn't what's actually being uploaded. The problem is what might be uploaded given the upload capability. The directive is phrased in such a way that if I allow uploads, I have to make sure copyright violations are impossible at the time of upload or be directly liable myself if they happen.
I can speak for myself that I might become activated (as in grassroots activities) when someone I like/trust is being attacked. What you're seeing here in these threads is activism and that's a good thing. Each of us brings perspective and ideas and styles of reactions. In times like this, though, we have to remember that this is foosel's decision in the end and we must trust her to make the best one that makes sense for her.
It's easy to disagree on the choice of pizza toppings but we hope by the end of that endeavor that it's not turned into a food fight. Unless you're into that.
I went trough GDPR thing few times and consulted lawyers and wrote bunch of code and whatnot trying to go around the whole crappy thing ... even own few domains
the are currently without any content as when I put them up the server was hacked inside 7 days
on some of the systems I control we had to pay 3rd party to do a cookie scan and control (imo this is a direct racket by google, the only cookies that site serves are trough google adds script and we have to pay additional 50+ eur monthly for the gdpr compliance addon) ... not much that can be done...
in case of octoprint I assumed that owner could virtually step down and move the online ownership to someone else outside of EU but I forgot about the whole income from adds, affiliate stuff etc etc that make the whole thing very very very hard / impossible
thinking more about solutions - how about using 3rd party "upload service" ... e.g. I use this pasteboard.co thing for images, pastebin.com is used by many big companies for snippets, mega could be used for files... I was not investigating this type of solution before 'cause it was impossible for my projects to use the 3rd party servers so we just closed all EU entities and moved away from EU (easy for me, I'm not EU citizen)... is the site affected by GDPR if it's only showing links to possible "problematic" content? since afaik they were not even able to charge bittorrent site owners as "link to copyrighted material" != copyrighted material..
just mine $.02 ... I'd hate for forum to die 'cause of GDPR
yes, that is always a problem when you use 3rd party service for hosting stuff and then link change... I do photography as a hobby and seen many forums where whole threads are with hundreds of broken links as foto hosting sites changed how their url's look when they upgraded their systems.. but implementing "upload filters" is impossible task
another huge issue is that "check" by bot is not a problem, the problem is that already there's a whole bunch of vulture companies that search for small business sites to extort money from using GDPR as excuse so checks are manual, real ppl pretending to be "your friends"
@arhi You are confusing GDPR (which is already in effect) and the new proposed EU Copyright Directive (which thankfully isn't yet in effect and could still be prevented in its current form with quite destructive articles 12 & 11).
@foosel, sorry, you are 10000% right my bad ... we were trying to make solution for all of them in the same time so I took it as one but yes, the new EU CD is not in effect yet
No, she doesn't. I mean, she does, but, it would require checking each and every upload manually. And with thousands of users, each with different things to upload...
That's a fulltime job for at least 10 people, 24 hours a day
I just don't see how a single person could check every upload for compliance
Please. No more personal attacks or national/international politics that aren't relevant. US vs EU competitions are silly, go elsewhere if you want to engage in this type of stuff. I'll start deleting posts that aren't on-topic.
/ impossible
