Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

cand.pglaf.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 529 posts

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#201

Post by quickthrower2 »

I have a contrary opinion to most others here.

PG should take steps to honour the copyright laws of other countries.

My reasoning is this:

Say hypothetically I started "Project Open" in a country with zero copyright protections.

Then by that country's laws, I can list Amazons entire kindle catalog, buy all their books and scan them, and make it open access.

And by the PG argument, ignore the laws of other countries that demand copyright protection for those books, until I get sued.

At which point I block the site for the countries based on IP address (as if proxies and VPNs and people who travel don't exist)

If someone did that, they'd probably be characterised as a pirate site and shut down by the FBI.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#202

Post by yetanother1980 »

zebraflask wrote: post #199
dsacco wrote: post #5

Can someone in Germany confirm this block is actually in place? In any case, if anyone in Germany would like to access Project Gutenberg, I maintain a full, daily updated mirror here: https://mirrors.sorengard.com/gutenberg . I also support FTP and Rsync if you’d like to download that way. No donations are asked for, but it would be helpful if more people hosted mirrors for precisely this reason :). Unfortunately thi…

They probably blocked some version of Mein Kampf, which they have every right to do and ought to do.

Why? I hate everything Hitler stood for. I read mein kampf it did not change my opinion.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#204

Post by barry-cotter »

roywiggins wrote: post #183
gambiting wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your website breaks moral decency laws in Saudi Arabia, and a court there orders you to close your website, would you comply? Look at it from another perspective - if a German court has a problem with German citizens breaking German law in Germany, it should perhaps pursue those citizens and judge them. A US website can't(and shouldn't) be breaking any German laws by existing in US - maybe you could make an argume…

There is the idea of universal jurisdiction for certain crimes, but it's usually stuff like genocide and really nasty stuff, not copyright infringement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_jurisdiction

Universal jurisdiction only applies if you lose a war. Winning makes you immune, like Kissinger, Bush, Obama, Reagan, the Clinton’s, Putin.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#205

Post by scythe »

teamhappy wrote: post #99
curiousfab wrote: post #40

PG did exactly the right thing here. By only blocking these 18 books, nobody would have taken much notice of this. By blocking all German users from the site, they will get a lot of media attention, and S. Fischer Verlag will get a lot of bad press. Whether or not they will move from their position is questionable, but it will hurt them. Just sent a small donation to PG. Making an effort not to buy books from that pu…

> Making an effort not to buy books from that publishing house ever again, and telling all my friends about it. Good luck with that. S. Fischer is owned by Holtzbrinck. They own Macmillan, Springer Nature and a bunch of other publishing houses. Here's a list of their subsidiaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holtzbrinck_Publishing_Group#S...

Is it so uncommon for big companies to evaluate the performance of various divisions independently? If Holtzbrinck recognizes that S. Fischer's activities have caused that subsidiary to start losing money, they will probably modify their opinion. Why would they want to subsidize a losing bet using the profits from other divisions? The fact that two companies are owned by the same holding group does not really mean they are the "same" company, any more than two companies which are majority owned by the same private investors are the same company.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#206

Post by jhasse »

harshreality wrote: post #192
jhasse wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this is an untenable position as it would mean that any website, published from any country, hosted on servers in any country, would have to abide by the laws of the world’s 193 countries. No. If you read the court order, they are arguing, that gutenberg.org is targeted at Germans. There are a few reason: 1. there's a link on the front page to view the site in German 2. there's a similar German project: htt…

None of those pass muster. 1. There are plenty of German-speakers not living in Germany. 2. Is that organization somehow affiliated with project gutenberg? Or did it simply use the name, which gutenberg probably doesn't care to trademark and wouldn't have the funds to legally enforce anyway. 3. You must know that hardly anyone uses .us. 4. So all it takes to be subject to a country's courts is for that country's medi…

Those points can't be picked apart like you did. They add up and make it reasonable to argue that gutenberg.org is very well known in Germany and that lots of Germans have downloaded the books in question. The copyright owners are still selling those here and have probably already lost sales due to this. They tried to contact gutenberg.org, but where ignored. This isn't about free speech amd censorship.

> If you think those points create any sort of legal nexus in Germany, that would also imply that most activism and protest against authoritarian countries' laws should be illegal

illegal where?

> 3. You must know that hardly anyone uses .us.

I really didn't know. .de is very common in Germany.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#207

Post by [deleted] »

zebraflask wrote: post #199
dsacco wrote: post #5

Can someone in Germany confirm this block is actually in place? In any case, if anyone in Germany would like to access Project Gutenberg, I maintain a full, daily updated mirror here: https://mirrors.sorengard.com/gutenberg . I also support FTP and Rsync if you’d like to download that way. No donations are asked for, but it would be helpful if more people hosted mirrors for precisely this reason :). Unfortunately thi…

They probably blocked some version of Mein Kampf, which they have every right to do and ought to do.

[deleted]

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#208

Post by ajmurmann »

gpshead wrote: post #181
ajmurmann wrote: post #172

I'm not sure I follow why people are upset with the publishing company that's sueing. They do own the copyright. One can disagree with the law and think it should be changed (I strongly believe that) but that's up to lawmakers to do. It would be irresponsible for the publisher to ignore that their ownership is being ignored.

Nobody likes an asshole, even a responsible one.

So in order not to be "an asshole" German published should just limit themselves to copyright defined by US?

I'm sure Disney wouldn't be happy either if their movies that are still under copyright in the US were to be published for everyone to download on a server in some country that had shorter copyright than US. They'd try to sue as well.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#209

Post by CodeWriter23 »

smsm42 wrote: post #103
KenoFischer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought so too reading the first couple of pages of the decision, but in the judicial conclusion section, the jurisdictional issue is squarely resolved on the "targets German users" issue, which the court bases on 1) Partial translation of the website 2) The availability of German language works 3) The "anyone anywhere" language on the website 4) A disclaimer that people should check their local laws (implying in t…

This legal theory is completely nuts. This means if I write something in, say, Russian on my website, and it's accessible to people from Russia, I am now considered to be obliged to follow every whim of Putin regarding my site's contents, even if I don't ever step my foot in Russia and don't want anything to do with it? Hopefully this is just plain old corruption and not idiotic legal theory that language you use mak…

And what about publishing in English? Does the UK take precedence and the US has no standing? Or is a publisher subject to courts in both countries?

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#210

Post by rhizome »

2ion wrote: post #196
Xylakant wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In early 2018, the courts lock out the public from a vast aggregate of literature in the public domain. The court decided that 18 titles should not be available. Locking you out completely was project Gutenberg’s decision. I don’t support either court decision, but let’s still keep the facts straight.

Regardless of what the court supports, this outcome is the direct effect of the court's ruling although it is not proportional to the scope of the ruling. Admittedly, I phrased it in a catchy manner.

However, it's reasonably proportional to the implications of the ruling.
Post reply on HN