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Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

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Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#331

Post by xvilka »

madez wrote: post #313

To put things into perspective, the plaintiffs lawyers, Waldorf Frommer, are known for shady tactics. They have built an industry of putting immense pressure on private people. They don't shy away from lawsuits because they are cheap for them and menacing for the people. They don't always win, but under the line it is a very profitable business for them; they employ about 60 lawyers. The public broadcast made documen…

Publishing the name of the company will not really help to fight them. Every company is a team of people behind, so listing names of those people can have a better effect instead.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#332

Post by Lunatic666 »

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…

Wouldn’t this be a good use case for IPFS? Then we could share the traffic and don’t have a single point of failure.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#333

Post by YtvwlD »

bhaak wrote: post #104
Tomte wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can still access it. No proxies or VPNs of any kind, just regular Telekom DSL.

According to heise.de, only IPv4 users are affected so far. If you are using IPv6, you are still able to access it.

Oh, wow.

Yes, it works here with IPv6.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#334

Post by YtvwlD »

teamhappy wrote: post #93
freeflight wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on one of the biggest German ISPs (Deutsche Telekom) and I can access front page and books just fine. Tried it with the HTML versions of four different books, among them "most popular" like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and A Tale of Two Cities, they all work without issue.

Vodafone/Kabel Deutschland doesn't seem to be blocked either. (I tried a couple from the 18 that are supposed to be blocked.)

Unitymedia doesn't seem to be blocked either.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#335

Post by slavak »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #189
barrkel wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carruthers

But they had to wait for him to enter US soil

Not only that, but his company was taking bets from US citizens, which is a much stronger argument for presence in a territory than simply "your website is accessible to our citizens."

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#336

Post by stale2002 »

mcguire wrote: post #284
gowld wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confusing the government of a country with its residents, especially a dictatorship like Saudi Arabia, is a harmful error. Sure, it's not your loss, but it's not their loss either -- it's innocent 3rd party's loss.

At some point, the residents of a country are responsible for its government. The inverse of the "consent of the governed" principle.

Saudi Arabia is run by a king. Its citizens don't get to vote them out of office. They are ruled by a dictator and many of them do NOT consent to being governed by the dictator.

Just because they'd get slaughtered in a revolt and don't have the ability to overthrow the king, doesn't mean that they have consented to the actions of the unelected people ruling over them.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#337

Post by freeone3000 »

Tomte wrote: post #319
piotrkaminski wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is distinct from, say, a company explicitly providing a service to customers in a particular country (cf GDPR). In what ways do you think the GDPR is distinct from the laws in the present case? Let's say, for argument's sake, that gutenberg.org starts capturing PII about visitors and storing it without conforming to the GDPR. Do you think it would be fair for the EU to sue them and (attempt to) enforce their l…

Of course it would be fair. Because EU citizens would be harmed. That‘s the duty of a state. Protect its citizens.

EU Citizens are harmed here! Those publishers are being denied income because a site is hosting content they hold German copyright for, for free!

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#338

Post by tscs37 »

mirimir wrote: post #329
Xylakant wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d question it’s illegal. They have the right to host the books in the US, granted. But do they have the right to distribute them in germany? That’s where the court says no. And given the legal situation in germany, I think the courts decision could be correct. It’s also a bad decision in practical and strategic terms: either they appeal the decision, then they accepted jurisdiction and the legality of the injunctio…

They could arguably have ignored the decision. If a German court rules that something should not be available in Germany, they should order German ISPs to block it. That's what the UK does about "illegal" torrenting and streaming. And that's what China does about the Dali Lama, Falun Gong, Uighur resistance, and so on. Edit: OK, so some argue that Project Gutenberg, which does business from the US, and which has no p…

An ISP block would also only block the entire site. This was not the intention of the court otherwise they would have done that instead.

The court only wanted some books blocked, not the entire site, because under german copyright those books are not yet public domain.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#339

Post by mseidl »

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…

I'm German and I can access it, and that book all of Mann's other books.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#340

Post by philippnagel »

jhasse wrote: post #186
pgtan wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you do a website and target a different country, ignore emails about legal issues from citizens of that country for months, you should start to think about respecting the laws of that country. Surprisingly then, why Doitsche Welle still exists without any lawsuit from abroad.

> Doitsche Welle What?

I guess dw.com.
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