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Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

cand.pglaf.org

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Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#431

Post by jhasse »

klibertp wrote: post #352
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?

Yes and yes. Other countries can ban their citizens from accessing the child porn. They cannot ban a citizen of another country from hosting said porn if it's legal there. This is obvious. Whether it's about porn, dissident political opinions or my cooking blog makes no difference. Repeat after me: your country has no right to order citizens of other countries who live outside of your country to do anything. And vice…

> They cannot ban a citizen of another country from hosting said porn if it's legal there.

That's not what's happening though, gutenberg.org was only ordered to make the 18 books not accessible from German IPs. No one talked about a hosting ban.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#432

Post by darklajid »

znpy wrote: post #426

I wonder if it works the other way around, in general: - country A has different copyright laws than country B. - A copyright holder from country A asks an organization in country B to take off some content based on country A's copyright laws. - The organization in country B decides not to take off the content, as it is perfectly fine under country B copyright laws, and block whole country A access. So here are some…

I wonder if, given their broad reply, that project shouldn't just block everyone BUT the US, since they decided that US law is the only that applies to them.

Now, I don't like these laws one bit, but I also really don't like this (over)reaction. If your legal counsel argues that you should block a country to avoid being sued for different laws, shouldn't the same counsel point out that this is likely for most of the world?

Or is Germany the oddball here and the majority of the world doesn't have CP laws, or doesn't care or .. have laws that are literally one to one compatible with the US ones?

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#433

Post by jhasse »

envy2 wrote: post #328
jhasse wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

German is spoken in countries other than Germany: looking at only countries where the German language enjoys some form of official or co-official status, we have Germany (of course), Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Denmark, Hungary, Italy, and Poland also formally recognise German as a minority language. That's not to mention the countless expats/second language speakers around the world…

> Having a German language version of your website/product is by no means equivalent to being subject to the jurisdiction of Germany the country.

Never said that.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#434

Post by darklajid »

robjwells wrote: post #111
Findus23 wrote: post #97

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…

Google does it. Wikipedia has local lawsuits.

I'd argue that this is part of the (unfortunate) reality of running a global project and, as commented elsewhere, the only safe option to avoid lawsuits is to pick a set of laws (US here), have lawyers for the same and .. restrict _everyone_ not under these laws to access the resource.

If you block Germany for different copyright laws, why not France? Poland? Canada? (My naive assumption is that these laws are not the same worldwide and differ in gazillion edgecases between countries, even if otherwise somewhat compatible. That assumption might be wrong of course. IANAL)

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#435

Post by nabla9 »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #366
CO-VAX wrote: post #41

I just donated $100 to PGLAF because they are fighting the good fight. Their donation page [0] includes "Think of this as a contribution to your grandchildren." However in this instance I think of it as a contribution against publishers (ab)using the justice system much like so-called patent trolls. > Q: The plaintiff is S. Fischer Verlag, GmbH. Is that the international conglomerate? > A: Yes, it is part of a family…

I hope you don't mind that I take this opportunity to tell about he GFF, because it is very much related. If you are European and care about freedom rights, there is now an equivalent to the EFF/ACLU, called the "Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte" (short GFF), which translates to "Society For Freedom Rights". They are mostly lawyers fighting strategic court battles in one of the cheapest country to do so, which in Eur…

European Digital Rights EDRi is the closest equivalent to the EFF in Europe. EDRi is an association of civil and human rights organizations from across Europe. It has existed since 2002.

https://edri.org/

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

https://edri.org/members/ (EFF from USA is also a member)

GFF is more German centered organization. I don't know how it relates to other German organizations like https://digitalcourage.de/ and https://digitalegesellschaft.de/

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#437

Post by dsacco »

Lunatic666 wrote: post #332
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.

Sure, I don’t see why not. How involved is the process of putting the data onto IPFS?

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#438

Post by yk »

darklajid wrote: post #430
expertentipp wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German ones are a particularly dark one.

How are German ones worse? I always think of Disney and Mosanto when I think about litigious companies..

The German copy right law was quite noticeable written with companies in mind, and had originally a right to private copies to get private people out of the reaches of the law. You could copy an entire book, or a movie, give it to a friend and that would be perfectly legal. (As long as you are clearly not doing that in any kind of commercial fashion.)

Early in the last decade, judges ruled that this basically never applies to anything internet, with the result that the entire copyright law is applicable. That would not be a big problem, except the entire law is written with the idea that both parties have already lawyers on staff. One example is the "Abmahnung," the way copy right disputes are meant to be resolved is, the lawyer of anybody who believes their copy right to be infringed sends a letter that tells the other guy to stop that, pay damages and sign a contract to never do that again. The escalation of that is, when you receive such a letter, then you sue against the "Abmahnung" and the judge who hears the case also decides about the original infringement. Trouble is, you are now suing and therefore the court is wherever the people who send the "Abmahnung" in the first place reside -- not a big problem if you are an large company in the first place.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#439

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

nabla9 wrote: post #435
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you don't mind that I take this opportunity to tell about he GFF, because it is very much related. If you are European and care about freedom rights, there is now an equivalent to the EFF/ACLU, called the "Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte" (short GFF), which translates to "Society For Freedom Rights". They are mostly lawyers fighting strategic court battles in one of the cheapest country to do so, which in Eur…

European Digital Rights EDRi is the closest equivalent to the EFF in Europe. EDRi is an association of civil and human rights organizations from across Europe. It has existed since 2002. https://edri.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Digital_Rights https://edri.org/members/ (EFF from USA is also a member) GFF is more German centered organization. I don't know how it relates to other German organizations lik…

I have no idea why I never heard of them before, but this is the first time. Thanks!

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#440

Post by freeflight »

mcguire wrote: post #301
freeflight wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's be unreasonable to expect people in other sovereignties to make special accommodations for me Nobody is expecting PG to do anything like that, what is expected is that PG just removes these 18 books from German access, if they don't then the German publisher can cease&desist them over giving access to said books, which would have no effect at all on GP due to it being an entity that's registered in California,…

There is nothing in the decision about "German access". " The defendants are ordered, on penalty of an administrative fine of up to EUR 250,000.00 or, alternatively, imprisonment of up to 6 months, for each case of non- compliance, said imprisonment to be imposed on the second defendant, to cease and desist from making the following works publicly available or letting them be made publicly available, namely:... " Plu…

The fact that they are talking about Germany is self-evident because it's a German court and they even wrote it out plainly, if you'd bothered to read further than the part you quoted:

"via the website www.gutenberg.org (including its sub-pages) without the plaintiff’s consent, if and to the extent to which it is possible for internet users to access them (screen display and/or download) from Germany."

If you want to talk about national courts censoring content from the whole www then you need to talk to US courts and their "chilling effects".

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