Originally Posted by Tristanian
So, let me get this straight. You claim that "someone" published addons on your website and you have no idea whether the licenses of said addons allow such an action, but you are keeping them anyway (!?!), in case their authors don't contact you and ask for their removal. With all due respect, such practices can only be described as "shady" at best. If there was indeed a malicious user that uploaded copyrighted content, without the copyright holder's permission, common sense dictates that you should remove said content, without question and not just wait and see what sticks and what doesn't.
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IANAL, but AFAIK in such a case, it is up to the copyright holder to issue a takedown notice to get them removed. It was their user(s) who uploaded the files and not themselves, and so while it is up to them to remove anything which does not belong there, it is up to the user(s) to follow the laws regarding what can be uploaded. I'm sure they have rules about what can be uploaded and what cannot, and if the user(s) violated these rules (which they seem to have), then they will likley be reprimanded (account suspension?), I would think.
However, they said nothing about "well, we're just going to keep them". They just expressed hope that the authors would give them the okay to keep them, which is totally different. From the way they worded it, some authors have contacted them and said "hey take that down, it's mine and copyrighted without distribution license", and Brothersoft is "in talks with them", ie. asking for permission to retain them as downloads.
Even so, I don't imagine many authors would say yes due to not wanting to update yet another distribution point with their updates (I know I wouldn't). Also, some of the addons (like Satrina mentioned) seem to be released under the GPL, and so they do have the right to distribute copies of those (I'm not sure which of them are okay and which aren't offhand).
Anyhow, this seems to have been an issue with WM lately as well, though WM is a bit more hesitant to host something, checking the licenses first and so forth. So, I wonder - are there any opensource type licenses which are safe to use for authors who wish their addons to not be distributed without permission, or is it more of a custom license authors need to implement? I know I searched through
quite a few, but never found one that really suited what I wanted a license to do exactly.
In the case where there is no commonly accepted limited-distribution license available, perhaps we as a community should create and share our own license?