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Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

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Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#231

Post by detuur »

trothamel wrote: post #216
jhasse wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

By this logic the US has no jurisdiction to act against a child pornography website aimed at Americans, used by Americans, with pictures of American children, as long as the website is hosted in Russia, where child pornography remains legal (or any of the other countries where it's legal and/or authorities don't care).

Remember, this means that the FBI has no right to even investigate the persons involved in it. No jurisdiction means no investigation.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#232

Post by jhasse »

harshreality wrote: post #223
jhasse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> illegal where ? 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 h…

> On the internet

I still don't understand what that means exactly.

> whereas Project Gutenberg has zero connection to Germany.

I disagree.

> what does the nationality of Gutenberg the historical person have to do with anything? Is shakespeare.com subject to uk laws?

There's a lot inbetween of

zero connection with country X

and

subject to it's law.

So regarding shakesbear.com: No, not necessarily.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#233

Post by trothamel »

jhasse wrote: post #224
trothamel wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But then German ISPs will be ordered to block the content in Germany. I don't know what's better, at least now the gutenberg.org frontpage is still accessible and theres an explanation which wouldn't be the case with an DNS block.

The German ISPs blocking the content is far better. In that case, Germans are living by German laws, and Americans are living by US laws. The alternative is to expect everyone to live by any law anywhere in the world, which is probably impossible in cases where things conflict.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#234

Post by Zak »

jhasse wrote: post #229
Zak wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's why the reasoning of the court went beyond "It's an international website".

But it did not use reasoning that courts in most other parts of the world accept, including the US coults it would have to ask to enforce its judgement in the absence of voluntary compliance.

PGLAF appears to be complying because it wants to win an appeal in German court, which might be compromised by ignoring the ruling of a lower German court. If PGLAF decided to ignore the ruling, there would likely be no consequences.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#235

Post by smsm42 »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #149
smsm42 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The language is one factor of many used to determine if you're doing business in Germany. Otherwise you have loopholes where German language websites advertising in German, to Germans, accepting Euros, and shipping to German addresses, is somehow not considered to be "doing business" in Germany simply because their offices and servers happen to be hosted in the US. Not completely nuts, but definitely an overreach.

> where German language websites advertising in German, to Germans, accepting Euros, and shipping to German addresses, is somehow not considered to be "doing business" in Germany simply because their offices and servers happen to be hosted in the US

You're saying it like it's a bad thing. If US has better laws than Germany and businesses serving Germans want to choose that jurisdiction because of it, it's "competition", not a "loophole". Otherwise another "loophole" we could find is that some Germans, seeking lower taxes and high standards of living, and more beneficial laws, may just move to US altogether, thus depriving German state of much needed tax income and stopping being subjects to German laws. We wouldn't want them to plug that "loophole", do we?

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#236

Post by [deleted] »

andrewprock wrote: post #215
jhasse wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#237

Post by detuur »

zanny wrote: post #157
Moru wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden you have to follow swedish law if you target your business towards swedes. If you use swedish language, sell directly to swedes and so on. I'm sure Germany has something similar.

Swedish is a bit more rare in International linguistics, but German is not. There is an entire population in the American mideast that learn and speak German as just an example of a very far off population of non-German speakers of the language. Even without speakers, Gutenberg hosting these books does not mean they are targeting Germans. I can put any of these texts through Google translate and read them myself desp…

I can't think of a single US-specific website that has a German language option for German-speaking Midwesterners. There probably exist some, but their German language option will be very clearly described for this purpose when this is the motivation.

There's a difference between theoretical plausible deniability, and practical plausible deniability. This excuse falls in the first category, accompanied by other colourful excuses like "I didn't steal that, someone must've slipped it into my pocket and I didn't notice". Theoretically possible, but ultimately implausible and completely dismissible unless you've got proof to back it up.

This sort of "remote jurisdiction" is necessary. Otherwise the only recourse to criminal foreign sites targeting your country will be to endlessly try to block it, while blocks are cheap and easy to evade.

The GDPR rests on the same principle of remote jurisdiction. If your website targets EU citizens, you have to abide by EU privacy rules.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#238

Post by drvortex »

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…

The block is indeed in place, but trivially circumvented using a VPN.

Please e careful with your mirror. You are now susceptible to the same lawsuit as the original Project Gutenberg. I am not sure where you are in the world, but Germany has legal assistance treaties with the US/UK/Scandanavia, all EEC and Schengen countries.

https://www.congress.gov/treaty-document/108th-congress/27/d... https://www.mlat.info/mlat-index

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#239

Post by tony101 »

madhadron wrote: post #144
robjwells wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just wanted to point out that the reaction of the court isn’t as entirely pointless as it may seem on first thought. And I think you’re right to do so! Honestly, regarding the whole case, I think the court has erred in accepting the publisher’s argument that Project Gutenberg is a valid target for a lawsuit in Germany. If the publisher wants the books removed it should sue in the US, if it wants to prevent access…

They have no legal basis for the books being removed in the US, since they are in the public domain there. If they can't make German law stick, they have no recourse.

They can go for the ISPs, or push for some German law to restrict local access. Doesn't mean they should, though.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#240

Post by detuur »

Pinckney wrote: post #200
jhasse wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> try to block

Excellent phrasing. They can try. And they'll fail. Blocking is trivially easy to avoid and circumvent. As long as there's no jurisdiction, a country can't take any action against a criminal site, it can only take steps to protect its population from harmful outside influence, which is by blocking. The offenders remain free and often unidentified.

But when there is jurisdiction, a country can take offensive action. It gives legal ground to investigate the involved persons, it gives permission to hack the website, it gives permission to hijack it and replace it by honeypots. It gives the weapons to not just temporarily silence criminals, but to destroy their enterprise and bring them to justice.

Remote jurisdiction is the base of modern countermeasures against websites and servers involved in drugs, child pornography, terrorism, and human trafficking. Without it, the only logical way to protect your population is to erect deep-scanning firewalls and abolishing free traffic across national networks, much like China and Iran are doing.

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