Does RIPA 3000 require service providers to retain the contents rather than merely metadata of SMS communications? The question is not deeper than what is articulated in its title
If you mean the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (aka RIPA), it doesn't provide for mandatory retention of communications data. Broadly speaking, RIPA is about interception as opposed to mass surveillance or retention just in case. The Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2009 obliged &quot;public communications providers&quot; to retain what is commonly known as 'metadata', i.e. information about the communication - the originating phone number, the receiving phone number, the date, time and duration (if relevant), the type of call or message - not the content of the communication. See Schedule 1. In April 2014, in the case known as Digital Rights Ireland the Court of Justice of the European Union declared the EC Directive invalid. In response, the UK made the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA) - sunsetted on 31 December 2016. This provided for the Secretary of State to issue a data retention notice to a communications services provider (CSP), requiring it to retain the data types set out in the Schedule to the 2009 Regulations. DRIPA's Explanatory Notes support my claims above with a summary of the history. This was replaced by the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA), Part 4 of which deals with the retention of communications data. Here too the retention is of the metadata not the content (see s11(87) and the Explanatory Notes).
Term 1 isn't going to hold up, but that is not a GDPR matter. It's just a matter of basic consumer protection law in the EU. You can't offload responsibility for your mistakes. Looking at 2, Dale M. already pointer out that it's now how the GDPR works. You are the Data Controller. X,Y and Z are Data Processors. Article 28(1) of the GDPR is in direct conflict with your disclaimer. You accept zero responsibility, the GDPR says you are fully responsible. That's the exact opposite.
Keeping logs of chats would not necessarily be against the GDPR as you have suggested. For the IRC service provider/operator: these chats/logs would be within scope if EU-based users are involved and this means the data controller/processors would have legal obligations to comply with GDPR. The IRC service provider/operator would be the data controller and would be held ultimately responsible for the data stored/processed through the IRC service, including backups and logs kept etc, and this would mean any sub-processors they select (such as hosting provider) would also have to be GDPR compliant. Due to the nature of IRC chats being entirely public in the same way forum board posts and comments are public, the contract terms between the IRC service provider and the IRC users would need to be very clear that this is the case, and the IRC users would need to give consent for this processing (this is more complicated for children, see Article 8 regarding consent from the holder of parental responsibility). For IRC users (personal use): If you wish to keep the chat records for personal use only (i.e. not in connection with a business or your employment at a business), then an exemption applies: This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data: ... (c) by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity; ... (GDPR, Article 2: Material Scope, Paragraph 2(c), p.32) For IRC users (commercial/business use): In this case I don't think you would have any legal basis to store/process these chats/logs if they contain personal data without a legal agreement with the data controller which would require you to put in place the same protections they have to under GDPR but then allow your business to access the data for specific purposes. While the information may be published or considered to be in the 'public domain', for you to take a copy of it without permission and use it for a purpose they haven't consented to would not be allowed under GDPR. Additionally, to go through the process of removing personal data from the chats/logs would in itself be considered 'processing' under GDPR and therefore would be unauthorised without a legal agreement with the data controller. Practically therefore, your best options under this circumstance would be if: The IRC service provider implemented a 'favourites' feature to save within their own system the chat conversations you wish to retain and refer back to in future. Since they hold the data and you already have a user agreement with them there is no further complications (this is probably the best option); The IRC service provider implemented a feature to download an anonymized copy of a chat conversation (not ideal as there are no guaruntees a user will not include personal data in their messages, though the user agreement could state that message content will be considered to exclude personal data, in a similar way to how StackExchange do for this website, see the paragraph titled "Information You Choose to Display Publicly on the Network" on the StackExchange Privacy Policy). Your business considered an alternative communications solution, such as hosting its own real-time chat system or forum boards system, in which case your business would be the data controller, and while subject to GDPR you could then define the purposes for which the data will be used in your own user agreement.
No, it does not. There is indeed a 2-year guarantee for all goods, but "goods" is defined to be a "tangible movable item" according to Directive 1999/44/EC Article 1, subsection 2(b). In less legalese, a physical item; software doesn't count. While there has been discussion about extending this protection to software, I'm not aware of this having been done yet. Even if it were, determining whether goods are "faulty" ultimately comes down to whether it conforms to the contract of sale (Article 2). I think it's likely that vendors in this area would put a disclaimer for unforeseen security vulnerabilities, or something to that effect.
Ultimately, the issue presented is as much a technical one as a legal one. You can protect software written in a programming language that you don't own the rights to via copyright. Indeed, the vast majority of copyrighted programs are written in programming languages not owned by the author of the copyrighted work. You can't meaningfully protect software that is subject to a creative commons or MIT license for commercial purposes. The question then becomes, is the material you want to protect simply software written in an open source programming language, in which can you can protect the software, but not the underlying language, or is it a mere implementation of open source software that is not so transformative that its character as open source software (or a derivative work of open source software) is overcome. This would be a question of fact for a fact finding at a trial and would require considerable technical expertise and understanding to evaluate. I know so many startups and platforms are written with open source software so I'm sure there is a clear answer to this but I can't seem to find one on the web. There aren't a lot of clear precedents governing where the line should be drawn. Software of any kind you would recognize as such has only existed for about 50 years. Open source software has only existed for 20-30 years depending upon how you count it. And, open source software has only had widespread commercial use for an even shorter time period. This is an incredibly short among of time in terms of legal history, and it doesn't help that business to business copyright litigation doesn't take place at all in state courts and makes up a pretty small share of the overall federal court docket. And most of the copyright cases that are brought in the federal courts are very simple ones. For example, as of the year 2015, most copyright lawsuits in the U.S. merely alleged that anonymous Internet users downloaded pornography without permission to do so: [T]he adult website Malibu Media is a prodigious enforcer of its copyrights. According to law professor Matthew Sag of Loyola University in Chicago, Malibu alone was responsible for nearly 40 percent of all copyright filings in federal court in 2015. Litigation against anonymous downloaders, by Malibu and other copyright enforcers, made up nearly 60 percent of the federal copyright docket last year. In 2016, there were fewer than 4000 copyright infringement cases filed in the entire U.S. (in all media). And, the percentage of civil cases that go to trial at all in the federal courts (rather than being resolved by a settlement or default judgment) is very small to start with, with many of the cases that are resolved on the merits not appealed. There are fewer than 400 appeals per year, nationwide, in copyright, patent and trademark cases combined, and patent and trademark cases make up and outsized share of that total because the amount of money at stake is higher on average in patent and trademark cases than in copyright cases, and many copyright cases involve copyrights in media other than software. Maybe there are a dozen or two software copyright appeals a year these days. The figures from the last few years, however, are much, much higher than they have been historically, particularly in the area of software copyrights, which is why the case law is so thin on so many more sophisticated areas of software copyright law.
You cannot do this through any established public license that I know of, but you could write your own. The model would be any educational use or non-commercial use license, such as CC NC licenses. The main challenge is defining the excluded classes of usage. That is why you should engage an attorney to draft this for you. I don't think there is any point in adding a $5M penalty clause. You offer a separate paid license for individuals who do not want to comply with the particular terms of your license, and set the fee to whatever you want. Saying that you're gonna fine violators is a bad idea because penalty clauses are illegal. Instead, the standard approach is a liquidated damages clause, where you state what a reasonable estimate of your damages would be. In the case of software that is available for purchase, illegal copying of the software obviously results at least in the cost of the software qua lost revenue as damages. Plus shipping and handling.
The most minimal elements of theft are: An unauthorised taking or use of another's property; and An intent to permanently deprive that person of that property or its use You've authorised the fee as per the terms of service that you agreed to. If you didn't read the terms of service, you are deemed to have read it. As the first element is not satisifed, no, it's not theft. As to what that fee is for, it's not really a question of law, but because they're a business and they are entitled to recover the costs of providing products or services and make a profit when you use their products or services, I fairly confidently would say that they're charging you to recover the costs of providing you their products and services as well as to make a profit from your use of their products and services. But again, not a question of law.
You probably can. There are a few questions here. First, is the message protected by copyright? In general, it probably is, but there are many exceptions that might allow you to use it without permission. Unfortunately, these exceptions vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The exceptions tend to allow the use of small excerpts of a work for various sorts of purposes that don't undermine the copyright holder's ability to profit. That leads to the second question, which is why you are using that message. If you're including it in your source code so you can test whether a message generated at run time is in fact that message, that's one thing, and it's probably okay. On the other hand, if the owner of the copyright sells a database of all its message strings, and you're compiling a similar database that you also intend to sell, that's probably not okay. A third question concerns the Firefox license terms. It's entirely possible that they allow you explicitly to do what you're considering, in which case it doesn't matter what copyright law says about it. On the other hand, Firefox is open source software, and under some open source licenses, if you incorporate any of the source code in your own product, you are required to release your product's source code under the same license. If you're not already planning to do that, you should consider carefully whether including that error message would trigger that provision (if there is one) of Firefox's open source license.