Quote:
Originally posted by arne_bab
Careful: Caching is dangerous legally. That way the programmers could be sued, and I assume we all don't want this. |
Caching is a universal technic for programming.
A programmer could be sued, only if it does not offer to the user an option to clear its cache. The detail level at which a cache content can be consulted by the user is not defined legally: a user just needs to know that there are data in this cache.
If it was so sensible, there would be no legal use of any proxy even for the web navigation. What is critical here? Are there legal requirements on what a cache can contain? Must we maintain a log of remote accesses to this cache? If so, we should also add a log for past downloads in the current Gnutella. I don't know the legal details, and I don't want to know more about it. If you are informed about such things, then don't program it, but let others do it, notably if such legal constraints do not apply to this programmer.
In US and on the Internet, until there's a legal constraint not to do so, you are free: what is not forbidden is authorized, and something can be forbidden legally only if there's a public statement about such regulation, and efforts have been done to make these constraints publicly accessible.
In France, a law is considered public and known, if it has been published in the "Journal Officiel" and some other private publications and newspapers covering the area of application.
In the European Union, a directive cannot apply to any member country before it has been backed by a national law defining its level of application: a member country can choose not to apply a directive, and can be attacked face to a European Court if there's no such law after a dead-line date, but even so, that Directive will not apply before there's a matching national law.