… it’s a bit amusing to find out that the Swedish National Police may be in a bit of hot water themselves after building a national “shoe database” (Google translation from the original Swedish) 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. The professor suggests that this appears to be a clear violation of Swedish copyright laws.
Read more on TechDirt.
Via Slashdot.