221–230 of 529 posts
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No, but most do. So translating to German and offering German books (pretty well known ones btw) should get you thinking about German laws for a moment.
Most speakers of German don't live in Germany. There are roughly 200 million German speakers in the world, but only 82 million residents of Germany.
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...
Well, depending on the books, it may be easy to download the books online without buying them...
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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 thin…
On the internet, where project gutenberg is located. The argument put forward, that you repeated, implies just as much that someone could be prosecuted in a Chinese court for publishing a harsh (to the point of being illegal in China) criticism of China named freexinjiang.com, at least if the site included a Chinese version. And that, since it refers specifically to a Chinese province/area, would have at least some nexus to China, whereas Project Gutenberg has zero connection to Germany.
Arguing the connection by language (the fact that German-language books of note exist to be digitized does not imply a connection to Germany the country) or Gutenberg's biography (what does the nationality of Gutenberg the historical person have to do with anything? Is shakespeare.com subject to uk laws?) is insanity.
> I really didn't know [.us isn't commonly used]
I didn't realize how this might not be intuitive to people in other countries, so...
The U.S. mostly invented / was the testbed for the internet. It's standard in the U.S., and for almost any English-language website that's not seeking to be tied to a specific country of origin, to use .com .net or .org. I get that people in countries where English isn't official or where they're targeting the country's population as visitors will prefer .cc tlds either to indicate that their site targets that country's residents, or targets people who speak that country's primary language, but .us is not at all the norm in the USA; .com .net and .org generally serve that purpose, and .us is a distant fourth [1].
But, supposing .us were the primary domain used by U.S. organizations, even if Project Gutenberg didn't use .org but instead used a generic TLD, it would still have zero to do with Germany.
[1] It's actually 6th, behind .xyz and .info, but those two probably have a higher percentage of spammy junk websites and email domains, so .us might be fourth in domains that aren't junk ecommerce advertising sites.
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> But....why? In a certain way, it's just some random court from a country you've never been to ordering you to do something. Why would you comply. In the beginning (like it was in this case with gutenberg.org), it isn't a court order, but just an email, asking me if I could respect their local laws. Books becoming public domain example: In Germany it's 75 years after the author's death, in the US some amount of year…
> Don't you consider a website in German, accessible from Germany, which looks totally legal for most Germans as some kind of legal presence in Germany? No. The site is created in some set of locations, and is hosted on servers in some set of locations. If none of those locations is in Germany, Germany has no personal jurisdiction. (At least under US law, which is what counts when it comes to enforcing judgement agai…
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Universal jurisdiction only applies if you lose a war. Winning makes you immune, like Kissinger, Bush, Obama, Reagan, the Clinton’s, Putin.
Nit: Kissinger was actually tried as a war criminal in Spain under the principal of universal jurisdiction. Assuming he did not visit Spain he was immune to actual punishment, of course, but "winning" did not make him immune to being tried under that legal principal.
I’m really for open access to old books, but for playing devils advocate I can see the courts point: International websites have to respect local laws. After all those are the only ones I can directly influence (by voting, etc.) If we’d start to ignore this (even if it is in my advantage in this case), this means I have no influence any more on how companies are allowed to interact with me (which shouldn’t be the cas…
> for playing devils advocate I can see the courts point: International websites have to respect local laws 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. Project Gutenberg’s argument is that they are only a US concern — everyone involved officially is in the US, and th…
thus, courts must be able to ask for what they did in the case of gutenberg.
by the way i dont see the big problem, except if the fines were big (maybe they were like only 200 usd)
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Perhaps the European interests fighting copyright regulation are stronger than the ones that fought privacy regulation. See: diesel
Not sure why you would mention diesel. At the moment, European governments are queuing up to announce draconian bans on diesel coming into force in just a few years. That's certainly not pleasing most entrenched players in the energy and manufacturing sectors. If you wanted to highlight established interests successfully fighting their corner in EU proceedings, you could have picked something like tax harmonisation o…
While yes, the contracts that companies selling GMOs utilise are socially unfair, it's not like we consider databases to be a horrific thing because Oracle licensing terms are bullshit.
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Another example: If you're in a country where child pornography is legal, should all other countries just accept it? If you're in a country where doxxing is legal, should the victims not be able to do anything against it?
Other countries can try to block that content, or they can try to punish their own residents for viewing it. Why would residents of the permissive country comply with a foreign court order?
Opens the door for censorship.
> they can try to punish their own residents for viewing it.
Impossible without more surveillance
> Why would residents of the permissive country comply with a foreign court order?
Let's say you want to travel to the country at some point in the future.
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gutenberg.org has a link to view it in German on the front page. I guess if you provide several translations and use a top level domain like .org, you are more likely an international web site than an English-only .us web site.
All websites that are not intentionally blocked from specific regions by the website operator, a government or internet service providers are available everywhere in the world. English is the world's most spoken language. In effect, most websites are international websites. That doesn't make them subject to the laws of every country. Most legal systems do not accept the standard the German court used and require a mo…
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…