Disclaimer and responsible use

What MinbarLive is intended for, what it is not, and who carries responsibility for a running installation.

In short: MinbarLive is free software provided as-is and used at your own risk. It carries no warranty, and the project accepts no liability for how it is used or for what it produces. Whoever installs and runs it decides what is recorded, where that audio is sent, and who sees the result, and is responsible for those decisions.

No warranty, no liability

MinbarLive is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3. Sections 15 and 16 of that licence are the binding terms: the software comes with no warranty of any kind, and neither the project nor its contributors are liable for any damage, loss or claim arising from its use. Nothing on this website, in the documentation or in the application creates a support obligation, a service level, or a guarantee that the software is fit for any particular purpose.

That exclusion applies as far as the applicable law allows, and no further. Most legal systems keep certain liability in place whatever a licence says: it does not apply to damage caused intentionally or through gross negligence, to injury to life, body or health, or to any other liability that cannot be excluded by agreement. Within those limits it applies in full.

Intended use

What MinbarLive is for

Making a spoken lecture understandable to listeners who do not speak the language of the speaker, with the knowledge and agreement of the people being recorded. In practice that means a mosque, an institution or an individual running it openly on their own premises, on their own hardware, with their own API key, to display subtitles for an audience that is present.

What it is not for

Recording people who have not been told that a recording is taking place, or who have no realistic opportunity to object.
Surveillance, covert monitoring, or capturing conversations the operator has no legal right to capture.
Any deployment where transmitting the audio to a third-party AI provider would breach the law, a contract, or a duty of confidentiality that binds the operator.
Presenting the output as an authoritative translation of the Quran, of hadith, or of any religious ruling.

These uses are outside what this project is built for and outside what it endorses. The software has no technical means of preventing them, which is exactly why they are stated here.

Responsibility sits with the operator

MinbarLive runs entirely on the computer of the person using it. The project operates no servers and receives no data, so it has no visibility into any installation and no ability to supervise one. Every decision that matters is made locally: which microphone is opened, which AI provider receives the audio, whether recordings are kept, and who the subtitles are shown to.

The person or organisation running the software is therefore responsible for informing those present, for obtaining any consent required, for complying with the data protection and recording law that applies to them, and for the terms of the AI provider they have chosen. The privacy policy sets out exactly what leaves the machine, so that this assessment can be made with full knowledge of it.

A note for operators in Germany

Two points deserve particular attention here, and neither is a formality. First, recording the spoken word that is not publicly spoken, without the consent of the speaker, is a criminal offence under § 201 StGB. A sermon delivered to an open congregation is usually a different case from a lesson in a closed room or a conversation before and after it, and the microphone does not distinguish between them. Second, a mosque that runs MinbarLive is the controller (Verantwortlicher) within the meaning of the GDPR, and the AI provider it sends audio to is a processor (Auftragsverarbeiter): a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR is required with that provider, and OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Deepgram each offer one. Depending on the circumstances, an entry in the record of processing activities and a data protection impact assessment may also be necessary.

This is a description of the questions that arise, not legal advice, and the people behind MinbarLive are not lawyers. An institution that intends to run the software regularly should get its own advice.

Accuracy of the output

Transcription and translation are produced by AI models. They can mishear, omit, invent, or subtly change meaning, and this risk is highest with religious content, where a small error is not a small error. Verified Quranic verse translations are inserted from a fixed reference text where a verse is recognised with high confidence, but everything else is machine output and should be treated as an aid to understanding, never as a source to rely on or to quote. The application asks every new user to acknowledge this before the first session; that acknowledgement is not a formality.

Support and misuse

MinbarLive is a volunteer open-source project. Bug reports, questions and contributions are welcome at github.com/MinbarLive/MinbarLive/issues, and are answered when time allows. Assistance with a deployment that is unlawful, that conceals the recording from the people being recorded, or that falls under "what it is not for" above will not be provided, and such use is neither supported nor condoned by this project. Modified versions remain the responsibility of whoever distributes them, as the licence requires.

External links

This website and the application link to pages operated by others: GitHub, the AI providers, gyan.dev for ffmpeg builds, YouTube tutorials, Linktree. Those pages were checked for obvious problems when the link was added, but their content is outside this project's control and can change at any time. Responsibility for them rests with their respective operators. If a link here leads somewhere it should not, please report it and it will be removed.

Questions

See also the privacy policy for what data is sent and stored, and the code signing policy for how released binaries are built and authorised.