At Brigade Komarla Heights, the residential units are designed to have good inflow of natural light and fresh air.
Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany
71–80 of 110 posts
Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> and operated entirely in the US.
The problem is that it sent copyrighted files to Germany (outside the U.S.). The court order only demands to stop this.
I doubt that the order is enforcible on U.S. soil. But if individuals associated with an uncomplying organization set foot in or have assets in a territory where the order could be enforced, they risk real consequences.
Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany
#73This 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…
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.
If you look at it from an EU perspective, if you download a book that still falls under copyright in the EU (without permisison) and the server is in the EU, then obviously this is a copyright violation and the person who makes the work available on the server has a problem.
If the server is not in the EU, then the person downloading the book is essentially importing a copyrighted work into the EU without permission of the owner. Which is also a copyright violation.
Then the question becomes to what extent the person who makes the work available has ties to the EU. The stronger the ties, the more effort can be required to avoid such illegal imports. For example, if there would be ads targeted at the German public, then courts would be very quick that this falls under jurisdiction of German courts.
So people in German who would use a VPN to get around the block, who still violate copyright law in Germany.
Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> and operated entirely in the US. The problem is that it sent copyrighted files to Germany (outside the U.S.). The court order only demands to stop this. I doubt that the order is enforcible on U.S. soil. But if individuals associated with an uncomplying organization set foot in or have assets in a territory where the order could be enforced, they risk real consequences.
US websites which insult the Thai monarchy also send illegal files to Thailand.
Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany
#75It'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.
First: Browsing around the website, all books I could reach from the homepage or by searching for titles I could think of are available in multiple digital formats. Second: PG is older than PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and even HTML. It isn't too surprising to me that there are works there that are text only.
I remember reading plain text books from PG at work ~20 years ago. The network was monitored so I had to bring them in on a 3.5" floppy. Having probably read thousands of pages that way, it's a bit odd to see plain text described as "unreadable".
Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany
#76This 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…
Sssh! If you tell foreign courts and litigants about VPNs, they'll stop accepting "we'll block it in your country if you get off our backs" and start demanding international jurisdiction. At that point "it's legal in my country" will no longer suffice for anything online (which is basically everything). Everyone will need to be in compliance with the most restrictive subset of the law. Just in the realm of copyright,…
Hell will freeze over before we get an international court.
The US literally has a law on the books to invade the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands if GWB is ever held trial for war crimes (wars of aggression have been a war crime since the end of WW2).
Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany
#77When you feel you are not doing anything useful think that maybe at least you are not doing anything harmful. What an incredible waste of money and time to avoid culture distribution, their authors long ago dead.
Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany
#78This 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…
> If you are blocking people from reading books in the public domain […] ‘Public domain’ doesn’t exist in Germany.
Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Small addition: the UrhG mentioned is the Urheberrechtsgesetz . Translated to English you would call it the "Law of rights of the originator". It is not just about "the right to make copies".
The English term is ‘moral rights’.
Urheberpersönlichkeitsrecht (what is called "moral rights" in English) is a subset of Urheberrecht.
UrhG covers copyright and moral rights, some stuff at the intersection, and then some, but on the other hand lacking a few bits covered by US copyright.
1:1 mappings between legal regimes seem to be quite rare.
Re: Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> And while I understand, that Project Gutenberg has limited resources and may have no desire to do the extra work of blocking works on a case by case basis, it would not have been difficult. Instead, they have chosen to collectively punish all people from Germany, which resulted us to be seven years without access, at least as long we did not utilize a VPN. They explain their rationale for this and it is a very soun…
> ALL works on the project are equally "illegal" (or at least many, they can't know which ones)
Those whose authors aren't dead for 70 years (because we don't have the "pre-1978" loophole the US has). Probably (but here things get vague) even limited to stuff originating from German authors, even if it was also published in the US pre-1978.
> limitless amount of punitive damages
Punitive damages? In Germany?
> I imagine that in the settlement they somehow got some kind of assurance from the big publishers that they won't sue and seek punitive damages for other works.
Project Gutenberg tried to make a stand and then found out that practically nobody bothered to notice their protest. Now they stop making an ass of themselves. Good on them.