This is not an aswer about Ovi, but a general concept to help understanding the problem. I'm also not a lawyer and I'm just trying to understand what I understood from reading/listening about this topic:

"Liability" is a tricky concept that has 3 axis:

- Sole individuals vs big corporations with the levels in between. If you are a sole individual then you probably are not very interesting target for a legal demand, while a big corp always is. If maemo.org is (from a legal perspective) nothing more than an aggregation of sole individuals then you see clearly what is the difference between maemo.org Downloads and Ovi by Nokia.

- Gratis vs paid. If you made milions out of something that is actually not even yours then you face different risks than someone that offers the same for free, even if it's also allegedly illegal. Since open source software is mostly gratis, this factor also helps getting it out of the usual areas of trouble.

- Software vs content. The Ovi store is not only a place to distribute apps, but also content. Digital content is in itself easier to copy, redistribute and consume. Nowadays there is a much bigger demand and business than in software itself. Again, open source software usually stays away from "blockbusters content" and frameworks like CreativeCommons are very good at defining who is the author and what can you do with the content.

Look at the combinations and you will see 2 extremes in terms of liability:

- Saucy company gets huge revenue publishing digital content for a price.

- Open source developer publishes software in his free time and all he gets is a Big Thank You.

I am willing to fight for the latter case if open source developers are indeed interested in publishing at Ovi. What I'm not doing is trying to convince you to do so. Either you are interested or not. There seems to be different opinions in the Brainstorm according to the votes, even if the discussion here seems to go more in one direction:

http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...store-ovi-com/