391–400 of 529 posts
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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.
Could you expand on why you think the name of the company is not important here?
If you want to take action, like boycott, these rent seekers. Here's a list of associated publishers: S. Fischer Verlag O.W. Barth Wolfgang Krüger Argon Verlag (de) Scherz Verlag (de) Fretz & Wasmuth Rowohlt Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlagsgruppe Droemer Knaur Die Zeit Macmillan Farrar, Straus and Giroux Faber & Faber Henry Holt and Company Holt Paperbacks Metropolitan Books Times Books Owl Books Palgrave Macmilla…
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…
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This is answered in the FAQ at the bottom of the article. Essentially because this sets a precedent that Germany believes it can sue over anything in the german language and other items in the library might potentially cause the same kind of lawsuit it's better to just block everything instead.
> Germany believes it can sue over anything in the german language You did not read the ruling (carefully). The language of the books was not discussed at all. It was discussed whether the offer (to download books) is directed to people in Germany. Project Gutenberg said "NO", because they use a .org domain. (Obviously trying to claim that Germans only visit .de domains and neglecting the fact that .org is really try…
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> 4) A disclaimer that people should check their local law How perverse. If you extrapolate this, any web site warning anybody about anything could be seen as endorsing that activity. "Child pornography is illegal and not supported by this web site" becomes "You knew there were child pornographers accessing your web site and this is proof you were aiding and abetting child pornography".
I think you're misinterpreting it. The courts mean that this is an implicit acknowledgement that the contents featured on the Gutenberg website isn't necessarily legal everywhere in the world, and that local laws may apply. If this website was aimed solely at Americans, this notice would be moot. It's like a Russian child pornography site warning that American members might be investigated by the FBI. If it didn't ca…
Likewise in your example, merely warning user _shouldn't_ make the operators subject to a foreign court. Said court would be able to seize equipment in its jurisdiction, pursue local users, compel payment processors not to do business with them etc., but a site operating legally wholly within its home jurisdiction (i.e. location of staff/business/servers etc.) shouldn't be subject to an overseas court merely because it is accessible from that location. It seems almost untenable that a site could comply with the local laws of every possible jurisdiction that may access the site.
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> A Court in Germany ordered that access to certain items in the Project Gutenberg collection are blocked from Germany... until the issue is resolved during appeal, [Project Gutenberg] will comply. This is really misleading. It implies -- nay, outright states -- that Gutenberg is merely complying with the court order. But the court did not order the entire site to be blocked. A more candid answer is found in their in…
PG decided they don't have time to deal with Germany's BS, so they implemented the simplest solution guaranteed to work.
For comparison, if they faced a U.S. publisher demand to block some books that were in violation, and in response they blocked all of the U.S., it would be misleading to suggest this was merely the "simplest solution".
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 t…
* The subset of things that are legal in all jurisdictions is probably rather small. Let's say hypothetically that a country bans the distribution of all works in English - should PG comply with that as well?
* Why should I have to care about laws beyond my jurisdiction when setting up a service? That seems like a tremendous burden.
> they'd probably be characterised as a pirate site and shut down by the FBI.
That's a likely outcome, but if Project Open is operating lawfully in its own country, on what grounds should the FBI be able to claim jurisdiction? Unilaterally applying laws over foreign persons in foreign territories feels like an overstep.
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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?
The US doesn't enforce those judgements any more, but the UK still holds the principle.
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The whole paragraph reads: > The decision to acceed to the German Court's order to make items inaccessible from Germany is intended to be a temporary appeasement, while the appeal occurs - this is because the German appeal Court will likely look disfavorably on PGLAF if it shows contempt for the German Court. Ultimately, PGLAF seeks to establish that any complaints about copyright must be brought either to the US Cou…
PGLAF thinks that the German court is wrong. However, they would prefer to not have German court decision - even if they believe it is wrong - against them to be in power, since international treaties mean it can have consequences beyond Germany. Thus, they are fighting it in German court. In order to raise chances of winning, they choose not to openly flaunt German court decision - which they can always do later if…
They made that point in their article and they also made clear that this is not just their opinion but also that of their legal teams in the US and Germany.
> However, they would prefer to not have German court decision - even if they believe it is wrong - against them to be in power, since international treaties mean it can have consequences beyond Germany.
And that is my point. The best way to not have a German court decision would have been not to ask for one. They could have easily avoided the whole situation if they just ignored the lawsuit brought against them in Germany.
> Thus, they are fighting it in German court.
They are fighting in a German court, even if they could have avoided it, because they would prefer not to have a German court decision? That doesn't make any sense.
> In order to raise chances of winning, they choose not to openly flaunt German court decision
The way to avoid embarrassment on all sides would have been to ignore the lawsuit and point the publisher to the proper ways to handles this, namely either US court or WIPO. Being ignored by a US organization wouldn't have been a big deal neither for the German court nor the publishers, this happens all the time. I appreciate PGLAF highly, but what they did here just caused unnecessary drama.
> - which they can always do later if it turns out resolving it within German justice system is a no go.
Which would be the ultimate embarrassment for the German justice system, don't you think?
> It is a common thing to do - you can disagree with some decision being legal and still temporary abide by it in order to work within the judicial system and not put yourself outside it.
I agree with that, I just think that in this case there was no need for it. PGLAF could have avoided the situation without consequences.