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Swedish Police Shoe Database May Tread On Copyright
An anonymous reader writes "The Swedish police, who have been instrumental in various raids against file-sharing sites, may have a bit of a piracy problem on their own hands. It seems they wanted to put together a database of shoe print information for matching crime scene shoe prints to particular shoe types. To do so, they used images found online, and some Swedish copyright experts have noted that this appears to violate Swedish copyright law. The police claim there's an exception for police investigations, but people (and some shoe companies) are pointing out that creating a database isn't about an investigation."
The investigations are just hypothetical and in the future!
Also, the NSA needs to spy on my phone conversations in case I ever become a terrorist. Which, I have to admit, is pretty good foresight on their part.
The enemies of Democracy are
Had they just requested sample prints, many (most?) shoe companies would probably have been happy to provide them with a full list - not because they had to, but because its a simple enough request to comply with. By doing the work themselves they ended up with less useful data that's, quite possibly, illegal to use.
Sigh...
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
kudos to you
I think you missed the point. The tread isn't the issue; the pictures are copyrighted by someone. You can't go on-line, scarf a whole bunch of pictures off the web, and then use them to conduct your business.
I can't do that with images, music, or anything else, and neither can any other agency. Otherwise, I could just download all the music in the world, and claim that I am building a database for future use in identifying stolen music.
Doesn't work that way.
Well, it's gotta be a pretty small data set. I mean, how many different kinds of Swedish Police shoes can there be?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I missed the part where police forensics are a business. Furthermore, these images aren't being tossed on their website. They're being used in an internal database. It's idiotic for people to whine about this. They're not claiming copyright or publicly using it to make money on their website. It's an internal database used solely (pun intended) for matching footprints to shoe types. I think that Swedish copyright law needs some serious work if that is somehow an issue.
As far as I can tell from the article no shoe company has complained. It appears that some professor has merely speculated that the database may infringe copyrights.
I agree with the suggestion that they would get better quality data by working with the manufacturers, though.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
And yet, if I download songs for my personal, decidedly private and not business use, I'm subject to damages of hundreds of dollars for each instance.
The point isn't that this is _bad_, but if they're going to go around busting down doors because people are sharing copyrighted works for personal use, they shouldn't be violating copyright for their institutional use and pretending it's OK.