Is it legal to provide online therapy outside of your country? I am based in Pakistan and I want to provide therapy for depression around the world using an app. I want the people around the world to use this app. Is it legal to provide online therapy in different countries?
This might be legal to do with patients in some places, but it is probably not legal to do in general, although it might be hard to enforce the laws prohibiting this conduct against a provider in Pakistan. Different countries and sub-national governments regulate providing therapy differently. Some don't regulate it all, so you would only have to comply with the law of Pakistan on the subject, if any. Other places require an occupational license to provide therapy, and in those case, the law of the place where the patient resides could apply that licensure requirement based upon where the patient resides, where the therapist is located when the service is provided, or by some other rules. You would have to determine this on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis to be legal. Many jurisdictions also have VAT or GST taxes that would apply to fees collected for therapy services provided to someone in their jurisdiction, and this would also be a compliance issue if there was fee for the therapy. As a practical matter, you would also have to consider if there was any meaningful way that you could be punished for providing therapy services or not paying taxes in particular jurisdictions where some patients might reside or be receiving your app's services. If there was no meaningful remedy for violating those laws against your company in Pakistan, you might decide to ignore those laws because you could.
Are online stores supposed to state the true “order cost”/value of an order on the package/envelope for the customs? Yes Is it common practice to slash 10x off of the price for the customs to not add various fees? Common? Probably no. Uncommon? Also, probably no. Isn't that illegal? Yes Of course, they can claim it was a mistake if ever found out, but if they do it consistently, that seems difficult... Not to mention there must be electronic proof of how much each order actually cost the customer? Yes Look, robbing banks is illegal but people still rob banks. Similarly, ripping off HM Revenue &amp; Customs is illegal but people still do that too. In fact, far more people do that than rob banks.
Generally, such sanctions prevent certain sorts of transactions in goods and services with nationals or entities of the nation under sanction. The exact list of transactions prohibited or restricted varies. If Open source software were being provided as a service, so that the recipient paid directly for a license, or for customization or configuration work, or for some sort of consulting or assistance, such transactions could be banned or restricted by a sanctions regime, but might not be. (If the sanctions included that particular class of transactions.) However, if it is merely a matter of an open source product being published, for anyone to download, install, and use, I don't see how that would be barred or restricted by any sanctions of the sort recently in use.
If the Kenya legislature passes such a law, they can impose such a requirement on Kenyans who want to create such social media groups. Note that this is a license from the Kenyan government, not a copyright or trademark license. In effect, it is a tax on running a social media group, along with various regulations. I have no idea if this bill is at all likely to pass. If it does pass, it might be hard to enforce, as it would probably require cooperation from Facebook and other social media platforms, and the companies which run those platforms are not located in Kenya, and might not cooperate.
These are some thoughts about the state of affairs in the US, I do not know how it works in the UK. In the US it seems to be a legal gray area. Gray enough that I do not think any lawyer could say for certain that the use of the data is legal. The data is stolen. If possessing stolen property is illegal then possessing this data is also likely illegal. Of course experts disagree, Stuart Karle, an adjunct media professor at Columbia University and former general counsel for the Wall Street Journal says: ...the documents have been published by the hackers, they are now public by virtue of being put on the Internet. But Barrett Brown was charged with trafficking in stolen authentication when he forwarded a link to some stolen emails. He signed a plea for acting as an accessory after the fact. He spent more than a year in jail while they sorted it out. In the US there is no law banning the download of hacked documents. In fact Bartnicki v. Vopper 532 US 514 (2001) stands for the rule that journalists can report on illegally obtained information. But contrast that with the Barret Brown prosecution! And decide where a data scientist fits. Also there is the question of whether an illegally recorded conversation is of the same "illegal" nature as hacked personal information.
The answer to this depends very much in which country you are in, and how you go about implementing it. First of all, this might seem obvious, but copyright only applies if you copy something that is covered under copyright. If you copy an idea - that having a library that solves problem X is useful - and that is the only aspect you copy, then under U.K. Copyright law, there is no copyright infringement, as ideas are not copyrighted. However, if you copy aspects of the library interface, or the object model of the original library, then it's a derived work, and the copyright of the new work is only partly yours. If you translate the source into a new language, then the copyright is largely still with the original author. Every country implements copyright law in their own way. One of the principle differences are in the available "fair use" clauses. You may find that you are entitled to a fair use clause for creating a "compatible" library, or you may be allowed to quote small aspects of the original in your new work. You need to check up on your countries laws.
Let’s work it through Is the work copyright? Yes. Are you making a copy or a derivative work? Yes. Do you have permission? No. At this point, it is prima facie copyright violation. However, various copyright laws have defences for breach. You don’t say where you are but as the USA is the most permissive in this regard we’ll use the USA. If it’s not legal there, it’s not legal anywhere. If it is legal there, it’s still likely to be not legal everywhere else. is it fair use? Almost certainly not. Wizards of the Coast (the copyright owner) already do this. While this service is free for creatures from the Monster Manual, it does drive traffic to their web site where they sell stuff. They also licence (presumably for money) others to do the same. Your usage would negatively affect the copyright owners market. This counts against fair use. Because it’s already being done, your work has virtually nil transformative value. This counts against fair use. You are copying a substantial part of the work. This counts against fair use. You are not using it commercially but neither is it for educational use. This is unlikely to matter. On balance: not fair use. TL;DR This is copyright violation.
Although the USA don't like it, there's a department called INTERPOL which is composed by about 150 countries. When a crime is committed and you need to involve another country to solve it, the sovereignty of each County prevents a police officer from one country acting upon another country. That's when the INTERPOL comes in. They usually requests the police from that country to act up. A judge from that country will grant their local police access to the data to be delivered to the country that requested it. Can the police get a search warrant for data 'in the cloud'? Yes. If the servers are located within the boundaries of your own country, it's a normal procedure. But like the above answer states, it's easier to subpoena the records than to execute a search warrant. In a subpoena, the company itself is bound to provide everything the police asks. Can the police get a search warrant for such third party systems? Yes. If there's enough probable cause, the investigation can lead to allow the police to try and discover files that are held by servers that store the cloud data. But if the servers are located outside the country and the company does not have any office opened in the country, a search warrant won't have validity in another jurisdiction and the police can't act without breaking the sovereignty principle. That's where the INTERPOL services are handy. The department is built in the principle of polices from different countries helping each other. The downside is that it's too bureaucratic and it takes a lot of time. For instance if he has a virtual machine hosted by Amazon, would they serve the warrant on Amazon, or on the suspect? Like mentioned by @Viktor, if the company has an office within the bounds of your country, it's easier to subpoena the records because that way the company will filter and provide only the data linked to the suspect being investigated. That is, the subpoena will have both the name of the company (Amazon) and the name of the Suspect, so the company can provide only the necessary files. Update If the police lack sufficient evidence for a search warrant, but an interpol country was, for some reason, willing to work with the police to collect and provide that information would they be able to use it even if they wouldn't have been able to subpoena a US country? Hypothetically speaking, I see your follow-up as a company that do have a local office and the Federal Police was turned down by a judge on a warrant/subpoena. In that case, there's no reason for another's country police to act on their own country. The suspect is a foreign suspect, the crime is a foreign crime and the police has no reason to work on it. But for the sake of argument, let's say that the local police was turned down by a judge for lack of evidence or something and the suspect has been investigated by a foreign country or whatever. If the information that the local police desires to obtain is available through the INTERPOL, it's most likely to be accepted since it's a data stored by an international police department. In your scenario, the foreign police was granted a legal right to search and collected the data for legal purpose. Maybe they can't use it in their own country, but since they followed a safe chain of custody and provided the information to the INTERPOL, that information has legal validity and it is not fruit of the poisonous tree if the chain of custody was maintained.