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Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

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Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#61

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…

Yes, I was annoyed by it being blocked here.

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Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#63

It's too bad that PG is totally reader hostile. :-P It could be a great source for the readers of the world. Instead it's a bunch of unreadable text files that give "entrepreneurs" the raw material they need to put out a bunch of $1 ebooks.

Why would you say so? I think it is really good that they offer to view the book lots of formats. And they haven't came up with their own scrolling solution, still scrolling the full book HTML is faster than any modern site.

Also, if I wanted to read a book to the full, I wouldn't have read it in their interface no matter how better they would be. So I like to quickly view text then download epub.

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#64

Project Gutenburg was blocked in Germany ? news to me, weird.. especialy considering the torrents and spy action that has happened in the same 25 years, while this token effort protects companies formed in the 1950s.

In this case Project Gutenberg blocked German IP ranges to try to avoid legal issues (and since they wanted to make a point didn't only block the material under debate but their entire site). That overblocking approach seems to be what they changed now in favor of a targeted block of just Thomas Mann's work or whatever it is the German publishers have been complaining about.

Why would a torrent site do the same?

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#65

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's a German-language "Projekt Gutenberg"[1] as well, a long time maintained by the publisher Spiegel. They're the more popular project of that kind in Germany, so people probably didn't notice what Project Gutenberg was doing.

They claim some kind of edition copyright on the works as re-published by them[2] which is funny or sad, depending on how you look at it.

[1] https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/

[2] https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/info/texte/info.html

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#66

It's too bad that PG is totally reader hostile. :-P It could be a great source for the readers of the world. Instead it's a bunch of unreadable text files that give "entrepreneurs" the raw material they need to put out a bunch of $1 ebooks.

What are you talking about? You can download PG books in ePub and Kindle formats directly from the site. Are you thinking of a different project?

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#67
What I'm not getting: If Project Gutenberg is US based, how can they be dragged in front of a German court at all? How could a German court enforce anything on a US based entity? So couldn'd PG's response just have been to ignore the case? What would have happened then?

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#68

What I'm not getting: If Project Gutenberg is US based, how can they be dragged in front of a German court at all? How could a German court enforce anything on a US based entity? So couldn'd PG's response just have been to ignore the case? What would have happened then?

Presumably, nothing could "force" them, but without cooperation they would simply be blocked forever in Germany.

Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#69
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…

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Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany

#70
post #9
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…

I agree it's good news that the project complied with the original court order from 2018, which was to block the works on German IP addresses that are still under German copyright law. Why would American copyright law apply in Germany? It's a bit disingenous of Project G that, instead of blocking access to just these books in Germany, they blocked access to the all the books. That was project G's, and not the German…

> Why would American copyright law apply in Germany?

It doesn't. Project Gutenberg is an American entity, and operated entirely in the US. This is like asking why should American free speech laws apply in Thailand in regards to Thailand enforcing lèse-majesté laws on an American website.

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