Again, understand, this has nothing to do with me. This has to do with what is legally allowed of individuals. The way the terms of the EULA and licenses with Nokia are written up (from device launch, long before HiFo even existed), only Nokia has the legal right to distribute the images. For anyone else to do so, be they an individual or a corporate entity, is illegal. It's illegal in the US, in the EU, hell, it's probably even illegal in China.

Reality is that there will always be a P2P market for such items. Doing illegal things at a personal level, taking that risk on your own, is something people do all the time. Every time you push a yellow light, or jay walk, or any other number of things, you make a choice to do so knowing there could be legal consequences.

My objection is that in this case those that are whining about it, and pushing to take this action are not willing to take the liability or risk on their own selves. They instead want others to take on the risk for them, but when called on to step up and take a leadership role that would include them in the liability, they quickly decline.

There were multiple, extensive attempts to find a solution for this that would allow the images to be readily, publicly available. It was in fact the single largest reason for why the process dragged on as long as it did. In the end, Nokia simply would not (or could not) agree to any number of proposed solutions, and had no proposal of their own for how to do this.


It also is potentially a legal risk for those legally responsible for maintaining the service. Just as BitTor sites that did nothing but list the hash files for shared items, listing a link can be criminally prosecuted. And in reality, the company pushing it doesn't have to even win in court. They simply have to out-last the coffers of those defending, which in the case of HiFo means about a week, with a really cheap lawyer.

That's actually a really good idea. This is something easily done, and verifiable by multiple sources. The risk in this is actually quite low (despite the fact that that's really the same thing as DHT files under the hood). Something to bring up at the next Council meeting, or to take on as a project yourself.