Friday 10 September 2010

One Step Behind

 Here's a tricky puzzle to outfox Wallander:

Swedish National Police may be in a bit of hot water ... after building a national "shoe database" for use in tracking what kinds of shoes make what kinds of tracks. But how did they build the database? They just went online and downloaded pictures from various websites.

And it turns out that might not be legal.

The police claim that the law lets them ignore copyright in solving crimes, but an intellectual property professor quoted in the article notes that such an exemption only applies in the direct police investigation of a specific crime -- not for the sake of building up a general database. 

Techdirt, via

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