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Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

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Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#291

Post by wolco »

teamhappy wrote: post #99
curiousfab wrote: post #40

PG did exactly the right thing here. By only blocking these 18 books, nobody would have taken much notice of this. By blocking all German users from the site, they will get a lot of media attention, and S. Fischer Verlag will get a lot of bad press. Whether or not they will move from their position is questionable, but it will hurt them. Just sent a small donation to PG. Making an effort not to buy books from that pu…

> Making an effort not to buy books from that publishing house ever again, and telling all my friends about it. Good luck with that. S. Fischer is owned by Holtzbrinck. They own Macmillan, Springer Nature and a bunch of other publishing houses. Here's a list of their subsidiaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holtzbrinck_Publishing_Group#S...

Don't buy but pirate and share. Let's not block information only payment.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#292

Post by mcguire »

Xylakant wrote: post #87
dsr_ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, however, a terrible theory, since the immediate effect is that every website is subject to every jurisdiction in the world.

No, that’s not the effect. If you make a website in the US hosted on US servers that does not obviously target german customers then you don’t fall under german jurisdiction. It’s not sufficient that your site is generally accessible from germany. However, if you do add things as “we ship to germany” to a shop then you fall under german jurisdiction - which is fine in my books, because the customer should have a simp…

Or, if you add German translations? What if you add a link to Google translate, allowing German translations?

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#293

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jhasse wrote: post #206
harshreality wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those pass muster. 1. There are plenty of German-speakers not living in Germany. 2. Is that organization somehow affiliated with project gutenberg? Or did it simply use the name, which gutenberg probably doesn't care to trademark and wouldn't have the funds to legally enforce anyway. 3. You must know that hardly anyone uses .us. 4. So all it takes to be subject to a country's courts is for that country's medi…

Those points can't be picked apart like you did. They add up and make it reasonable to argue that gutenberg.org is very well known in Germany and that lots of Germans have downloaded the books in question. The copyright owners are still selling those here and have probably already lost sales due to this. They tried to contact gutenberg.org, but where ignored. This isn't about free speech amd censorship. > If you thin…

> Those points can't be picked apart like you did. They add up

Others are doing a fine job of taking apart the specifics, but it's important to understand why this form of argument is itself a fallacy.

Inference works by taking into account new evidence and using it to adjust the probability with which you believe something to be true. So if you see Bob wearing a red shirt, you are more likely to believe that Bob owns a red shirt. Could still be that he has borrowed it or something, but it's now more likely he owns one than it was previously. By contrast, if you go all through Bob's bedroom and find zero red shirts, that makes it less likely, even though it's still possible he owns one that isn't in his bedroom.

The problem with allowing plaintiffs or prosecutors to play this game is that they can take the list of everything you've ever done, ignore everything that makes what they're trying to prove less likely and present only the list of things that make it more likely. If you look only at that evidence then each piece of it increases the probability that you believe what they want you to believe, regardless of whether it's actually true. How guilty they can make you look is directly proportional to their level of resources in finding things that make you look bad, independent of your actual guilt.

> I really didn't know. .de is very common in Germany.

Most countries have .co.uk, .org.uk, .net.uk, etc. The US doesn't have those. US companies use .com, .org, .net, etc. regardless that they're nominally not US-specific.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#294

Post by mcguire »

ajmurmann wrote: post #172

I'm not sure I follow why people are upset with the publishing company that's sueing. They do own the copyright. One can disagree with the law and think it should be changed (I strongly believe that) but that's up to lawmakers to do. It would be irresponsible for the publisher to ignore that their ownership is being ignored.

According to the linked faq,

* They did not own all of the copyrights at the time the suit was filed. In fact, they may not own the rights now.

* International treaties like the Berne Convention have means to resolve these disputes. The plaintiffs have ignored those and filed suit in their own, likely incorrect, jurisdiction.

* The suit, and the decision, does not ask for the texts in question be blocked in German jurisdiction. It calls for them to be taken down entirely, even though they are legal in the US.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#295

Post by 762236 »

curiousfab wrote: post #40

PG did exactly the right thing here. By only blocking these 18 books, nobody would have taken much notice of this. By blocking all German users from the site, they will get a lot of media attention, and S. Fischer Verlag will get a lot of bad press. Whether or not they will move from their position is questionable, but it will hurt them. Just sent a small donation to PG. Making an effort not to buy books from that pu…

But did they do the right thing by participating in a court that has no jurisdiction? Why would they participate in that? Doesn't participating extend legitimacy to the claims, and make one subject the outcome (including paying the legal fees when losing)?

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#296

Post by deanmen »

smsm42 wrote: post #235
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language is one factor of many used to determine if you're doing business in Germany. Otherwise you have loopholes where German language websites advertising in German, to Germans, accepting Euros, and shipping to German addresses, is somehow not considered to be "doing business" in Germany simply because their offices and servers happen to be hosted in the US. Not completely nuts, but definitely an overreach.

> where German language websites advertising in German, to Germans, accepting Euros, and shipping to German addresses, is somehow not considered to be "doing business" in Germany simply because their offices and servers happen to be hosted in the US You're saying it like it's a bad thing. If US has better laws than Germany and businesses serving Germans want to choose that jurisdiction because of it, it's "competitio…

You have to pay U.S. taxes on worldwide income. The U.S. is the only country that does this, though.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#297

Post by mcguire »

ajmurmann wrote: post #208
gpshead wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody likes an asshole, even a responsible one.

So in order not to be "an asshole" German published should just limit themselves to copyright defined by US? I'm sure Disney wouldn't be happy either if their movies that are still under copyright in the US were to be published for everyone to download on a server in some country that had shorter copyright than US. They'd try to sue as well.

In the US, yes. Disney would be free to ask US courts to require ISPs in the US to block those servers, assuming they have no more direct legal route by treaty.

Disney could also apply legal sanctions to the owners of the servers, should they ever travel to the US, and could probably convince the US Marines to extradite the owner. But I don't think that should be encouraged.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#298

Post by mcguire »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #201

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…

PG is honoring the laws of the US and, by extension, any country that had an appropriate treaty with the US. Which includes Germany.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#299

Post by mcguire »

Myrmornis wrote: post #276

> The is no reason to remove them. The 18 eBooks are all in the public domain in the US, and have been for many years. Copyright status in another country is not relevant to the legitimate ability of Project Gutenberg -- or anyone/anything in the US -- to make any use of these books. Suppose a country X existed which doesn't honor US copyrights at all. By symmetry, it seems that Project Gutenberg would approve of a w…

For many years, X was China. I have no information about whether PG approved of that or not. PG follows the laws of the country in which it is based.

Re: Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany

#300

Post by dsacco »

err4nt wrote: post #230
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…

Hi! Thanks for the service you do for others by mirroring this content - what's involved with being a mirror? I'm not sure if it's something I have the means or skills to do, but Project Gutenberg (and information projects like it) are the key part of the internet — the parts that deserve to be reserved and accessed freely by all. I'd love to see if there's anything I could do to help out!

It’s very easy. I host official mirrors for a bunch of open source projects at https://mirrors.sorengard.com.

You set up Apache on a web server you control, configure virtual host settings in the Apache config files, then put your files to be hosted in something like /var/www/ and point Apache to it. Then set up Rsync by running the rsync daemon and setting an /etc/rsyncd.conf file that configures where the files are located and who can access them.

For example, let’s say you wanted to set up a mirror for the Ubuntu Package Archive. You could do that step by step with the following resources:

1. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst...

2. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

3. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Rsyncmirror

Maybe I’ll write up a short guide and throw it up somewhere. It’s really pretty straightforward. FTP is unfortunately trickier than HTTP and Rsync, but vsftpd removes a lot of the warts.

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