[libreoffice-website] Legal issues wrt. donations (was: Banner for website)

Hi!

On Saturday 12 February 2011, Florian Effenberger wrote:
> for the Foundation fundraising, I plan to have a banner (or maybe
> rotating banners) at top of each site, i.e. all native language sites
> and all others like LibreOffice-Box.

While I support this initiative I'm a bit worried if putting such banner on 
the Finnish website might cause legal problems for me and other editors of the 
Finnish website. Collecting money by appealing to the public for donations 
requires a permit under Finnish law. Here is some info in English: 

  http://www.poliisi.fi/poliisi/home.nsf/pages/562C8788A7A74631C2256C29003042D8?opendocument

Unfortunately the translation is a bit incomplete but hopefully 
understandable. TDF of course does not operate under Finnish law and the 
servers are in (mostly?) in Germany. But since all of us who maintain the 
Finnish website are Finnish residents and the site is mostly targeted for 
Finns I am fairly confident that the law does apply to us. Violating this law 
could mean up to two years in prison for those responsible of collecting money 
against the law.

For this reason the Finnish website does not have a donations page and we 
don't even mention the possibility of giving donations. I could try to get us 
the required permit. I know some Finnish free software projects have got one 
but I'm afraid in this case it won't be easy and it definitely will take some 
time.

Harri

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