Sorry for breaking up your sentence to respond to individual points, but if you didn't spew such dreadful runons, it wouldn't be necessary....You said you didn't understand why. Quite reasonable that someone who hasn't kept track of your past posts on the topic could take that as a request for explanation, rather than a statement of despair because you find the explanation worthless.

It's important to realize that legal issues are only decided in court, and after massive out-of-pocket expenses on both sides. Although few, if any, US cases have held merely linking to infringing material to be copyright infringement in the final judgement, there have been a number of such cases that did go to trial rather than being discarded out of hand. Even if one is 100% confident (as I am) that Nokia couldn't win in court, there's no guarantee we could fight to that point -- that's why forums like this tend to err so far on the side of caution.

Meamo.org would probably get off the hook.

But maemo.org, on the other hand, can't reasonably have any liability for discussing it -- discussion is an order farther removed from infringement than linking, and AFAIK never made it to trial.

Whether or not a member of this site is involved in the original leak is irrelevant -- only possible impact of that would be a subpoena to determine the identity of the leaker.


Eh? It's clearly illegal in many countries -- the firmware image contains information copyrighted by Nokia, and the default license for all copyrighted material is "all rights reserved", i.e. any redistribution is illegal. Unless you got a license from Nokia to share it, or it's covered by your countries "fair-use" (or equivalent) exception, bittorrenting it is illegal, uploading it to megaupload (or similar) is illegal, and downloading from megaupload (or similar) may or may not be illegal (whether both parties or only the uploading party is considered criminal varies by country).

The initial upload may have been, as some suggest, a violation of the EULA, but EULAs are generally on relatively shaky ground, and in any event that can't apply to someone downloading it and installing it, since they never agreed to the EULA. But copyright issues alone ensure there's a ton of technically illegal acts going on when a leaked build circulates. Many netizens happily ignore these legalities, if only because they find them ridiculous (after all, it's equally illegal, and for the same reasons, to post some file (without a GPL or similar license notice) from a "clean" N900 to help some poor guy who overwrote it on his and save him from a reflash, which we see all the time), but that doesn't make it legal.