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Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#21

Post by dmos62 »

zmix wrote: post #16
heisig wrote: post #4

This is great news! This is a wonderful project, and the fact that it wasn't accessible from Germany made me profoundly sad and angry. I hope the responsible copyright lawyers have a hard time sleeping because of this and consider changing their line of work. If you are blocking people from reading books in the public domain, it is a good indication that you are one of the bad guys. Even worse, they only blocked peop…

In Germany, the concept of "Public Domain" does not exist. (EDIT: It may exist 70 years after the authors death). IANAL. Besides that, even if it would, the books would not have been in the Public Domain. From the announcement: > In Germany, they are copyrighted based on "life +70 years" of copyright protection (so, copyright will expire after 2020, 2025 and 2027, respectively). From a legal and business perspective,…

Nitpick. German intellectual property laws are part of German legislation. Legislation is a body of laws. Maybe you meant the German legislative community. Well, it's their responsibility to maintain the legislation. Laws are not immutable.

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#22

Post by rob74 »

willvarfar wrote: post #13

Was there any general awareness in Germany the PG was blocked, and if so, did activism arise? Or did PG block, and mainstream Germany not notice? Or did Germans just shrug and use proxies? Personally I am a PG user but I’m not in Germany. And I’ve read several PG books. But I have also noticed that the download count for many of them is really really low, which is basically saying that PG doesn’t have a lot or actual…

There was no general awareness AFAIK. I'm from Germany and only learnt about it when I went to their site to download a book I was interested in (back in 2019 I think), found out it was blocked, researched the reason, found out that they didn't actually have to block everything, got angry (partly at the plaintiffs, but mostly at PG for their "overcompliance"), then shrugged and downloaded the book from somewhere else. So if this overcompliance was really intended to "instrumentalize" their readers, like the plaintiffs said, then I guess they unfortunately overestimated their impact.

The news that the blocking has been removed was reported yesterday by IT news sites (e.g. https://www.heise.de/news/Literaturportal-Project-Gutenberg-...), but it wasn't exactly front page news either...

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#23

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

NoCanDo wrote: post #2

Fischer being the cunts they are.

Scummy corporations are gonna be scummy if the law lets them do it. If it's not Fischer, it's gonna be someone else. This is more of a failure of the legal system which enable such behavior.

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#24

Post by tut-urut-utut »

chronogram wrote: post #11
heisig wrote: post #4

This is great news! This is a wonderful project, and the fact that it wasn't accessible from Germany made me profoundly sad and angry. I hope the responsible copyright lawyers have a hard time sleeping because of this and consider changing their line of work. If you are blocking people from reading books in the public domain, it is a good indication that you are one of the bad guys. Even worse, they only blocked peop…

The German copyright law doesn't seem unnecessarily vague, simply life+70 years, which is why there are now two authors blocked (3 at the time of the link). If you have a problem with Germany's life+70 years then you shouldn't be upset with the lawyers, you should be upset with your government to change your government's copyright laws to match whatever the US does.

> you should be upset with your government to change your government's copyright laws to match whatever the US does.

Why should every government copy what US does?

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#25

Post by miki123211 »

What would have happened if Gutenberg had ignored the German court's ruling?

Does Germany have any leverage over an institution that is fully based in the US?

If so, does it mean that, as a hypothetical website owner, I need to understand and be compliant with every law in every possible country, or risk fines / imprisonment?

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#26

Post by mantas »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #24
chronogram wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The German copyright law doesn't seem unnecessarily vague, simply life+70 years, which is why there are now two authors blocked (3 at the time of the link). If you have a problem with Germany's life+70 years then you shouldn't be upset with the lawyers, you should be upset with your government to change your government's copyright laws to match whatever the US does.

> you should be upset with your government to change your government's copyright laws to match whatever the US does. Why should every government copy what US does?

Looks like OP wants German laws to match US laws in this department. So he should be angry at lawmakers, not at lawyers.

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#27

Post by ho_schi »

I want state here on fact, the "copyright" is an rather new anglon-saxon invention and was only later imported to Germany[1]. Interestingly, the era of the "land of poets and thinkers" and the economic rise of Germany was boosted by the fact - that there were no copyrights laws which hindered. Authors had to publish good and more work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Background

Quote from Wikipedia

Printing brought profound social changes. The rise in literacy across Europe led to a dramatic increase in the demand for reading matter. Prices of reprints were low, so publications could be bought by poorer people, creating a mass audience. In German language markets before the advent of copyright, technical materials, like popular fiction, were inexpensive and widely available; it has been suggested this contributed to Germany's industrial and economic success. After copyright law became established (in 1710 in England and Scotland, and in the 1840s in German-speaking areas) the low-price mass market vanished, and fewer, more expensive editions were published; distribution of scientific and technical information was greatly reduced.

And from the history arctile

Heinrich Heine, in a 1854 letter to his publisher, complains: "Due to the tremendously high prices you have established, I will hardly see a second edition of the book anytime soon. But you must set lower prices, dear Campe, for otherwise I really don't see why I was so lenient with my material interests."

It is not okay to claim other works as yours, publish private material or just don't give you a fair share upon your work. Probably we should have opted for another approach than "copyright" or "patents". Luckily the US at least got "Fair Use" and maybe the idea of a "Culture Flatrate" from Germany is also a good idea.

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#28

Post by pgeorgi »

chronogram wrote: post #11
heisig wrote: post #4

This is great news! This is a wonderful project, and the fact that it wasn't accessible from Germany made me profoundly sad and angry. I hope the responsible copyright lawyers have a hard time sleeping because of this and consider changing their line of work. If you are blocking people from reading books in the public domain, it is a good indication that you are one of the bad guys. Even worse, they only blocked peop…

The German copyright law doesn't seem unnecessarily vague, simply life+70 years, which is why there are now two authors blocked (3 at the time of the link). If you have a problem with Germany's life+70 years then you shouldn't be upset with the lawyers, you should be upset with your government to change your government's copyright laws to match whatever the US does.

It's a bit more complicated: The US adopted[1] the international regimen (life + 70) with an exception that US statute of limitations from before 1978 continue to apply to works published in the US before 1978.

So the US adopted everybody else's rules but has an escape hatch for older works - that only applies in the US and this is where the contention over these 3-5 works comes from.

The US later extended the "70 years" rule for anonymous, pseudonymous and work-for-hire works to cover 95 years since publication or 120 years since creation (whatever happens first) because The Mouse squeaked[2].

I'd prefer Germany not to adopt that one.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#29

Post by cl3misch »

miki123211 wrote: post #25

What would have happened if Gutenberg had ignored the German court's ruling? Does Germany have any leverage over an institution that is fully based in the US? If so, does it mean that, as a hypothetical website owner, I need to understand and be compliant with every law in every possible country, or risk fines / imprisonment?

I guess maybe, iff you host content copyrighted in Germany?

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#30

Post by Mindwipe »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #24
chronogram wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The German copyright law doesn't seem unnecessarily vague, simply life+70 years, which is why there are now two authors blocked (3 at the time of the link). If you have a problem with Germany's life+70 years then you shouldn't be upset with the lawyers, you should be upset with your government to change your government's copyright laws to match whatever the US does.

> you should be upset with your government to change your government's copyright laws to match whatever the US does. Why should every government copy what US does?

At least in this case the US copied Europe with it's term extensions (Disney certainly weren't unhappy about it but the notion that Disney drove this is a bit of a myth). And Europe set that term length when the EU unified terms because it set it at the longest length from the member nations at the time, which was Germany's life+70 years.

It's pretty interesting but the current global norm for copyright duration is, due to circumstance, almost entirely based on German norms.

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