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Project Gutenberg Blocks German Users After Outrageous Court Ruling (teleread.org)
Slashdot reader David Rothman writes: The oldest public domain publisher in the world, Project Gutenberg, has blocked German users after an outrageous legal ruling saying this American nonprofit must obey German copyright law... Imagine the technical issues for fragile, cash-strapped public domain organizations -- worrying not only about updated databases covering all the world's countries, but also applying the results to distribution.
TeleRead carries two views on the German case involving a Holtzbrinck subsidiary...
Significantly, older books provide just a tiny fraction of the revenue of megaconglomerates like Holtzbrinck but are essential to students of literature and indeed to students in general. What's more, as illustrated by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in the U.S., copyright law in most countries tends to reflect the wishes and power of lobbyists more than it does the commonweal. Ideally the travails of Project Gutenberg will encourage tech companies, students, teachers, librarians and others to step up their efforts against oppressive copyright laws. While writers and publishers deserve fair compensation, let's focus more on the needs of living creators and less on the estates of authors dead for many decades. The three authors involved in the German case are Heinrich Mann (died in 1950), Thomas Mann (1955) and Alfred Döblin (1957).
One solution in the U.S. and elsewhere for modern creators would be national library endowments... Meanwhile, it would be very fitting for Google and other deep-pocketed corporations with an interest in a global Internet and more balanced copyright to help Gutenberg finance its battle. Law schools, other academics, educators and librarians should also offer assistance.
Significantly, older books provide just a tiny fraction of the revenue of megaconglomerates like Holtzbrinck but are essential to students of literature and indeed to students in general. What's more, as illustrated by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in the U.S., copyright law in most countries tends to reflect the wishes and power of lobbyists more than it does the commonweal. Ideally the travails of Project Gutenberg will encourage tech companies, students, teachers, librarians and others to step up their efforts against oppressive copyright laws. While writers and publishers deserve fair compensation, let's focus more on the needs of living creators and less on the estates of authors dead for many decades. The three authors involved in the German case are Heinrich Mann (died in 1950), Thomas Mann (1955) and Alfred Döblin (1957).
One solution in the U.S. and elsewhere for modern creators would be national library endowments... Meanwhile, it would be very fitting for Google and other deep-pocketed corporations with an interest in a global Internet and more balanced copyright to help Gutenberg finance its battle. Law schools, other academics, educators and librarians should also offer assistance.
they just can't stop others from using the content as they please.
And exactly this is wrong in my opinion.
Why feed a disney with free material to exploit to make movies? Sorry, if they want to use a book, and make a movie from it, they should pay.
If you can't make money off of an artistic work within 20 years, there's a strong chance that your work simply sucks or you suck at marketing it.
Of course. But what has sucking me in marketing to do with your idea that you can exploit my work for free?
you'll be further compelled to make something that's newer and better instead of trying to sell your sucky eBook for your entire life.
Are you really such an idiot?
How exactly does one make a living, by working 40h the week, to pay his rent and feed the kids, and spend another 20h to write his eBook? And then you come and say: hey if he can not market it, it must suck? And now as he spent so much time for a work that sells bad at the moment he should write a new work?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The united states should just switch to the german/european model. And then you for funk sake ask the original author or his heirs for permission and let them participate on the profits you make. I'm funk tired about this free rider attitude when it comes to copyrights in the US. You can not feed your poor, because you don't want higher taxes ... or what ever. But then again you want everything for free someone else made. Just because of "copyrights are to long" ????
Tolkien made nearly no money at all during his life time. Sure, his works sucked in some way, but now they are world literature. And the movies brought in billions.
Do you really think it is fair to not have the family participate in the revenue LOTR made?
I don't.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Urheberrecht is not the same as copyright, no matter how much the Content Mafia would love it to be!
Urheberrecht is an AUTHOR's privilege, while copyright is a DISTRIBUTOR's privilege (at the expense of the actual author, mostly deliberately so).
Urheberrecht is NOT transferable, copyright IS transferable (and mostly is).
Urheberrecht is IMPLICIT, copyright is EXPLICIT. Meaning, you don’t have to add a stupid (c) everywhere. The only thing that matters is the treshold of originality ("Schöpfungshöhe").
This makes Urheberrecht a vastly different law.
Give it the short time frames of when it was new, and privileging people to enforce a monopoly to some record of information suddenly seems a lot more sensible, no? (Apart from the fact, that causality makes it impossible to enforce, its infinite no-cost abundance makes it worthless, and the fuckin' cokeheads should just do a proper service business contract in advance, like literally every other business since the dawn of the economy, instead of making up imaginary delusions of “owning” or "stealing" patterns/information/data, of course.)
Also, there was a time, when Germany had no such laws AT ALL, while the UK already had copyright. And as a result, the UK suffered what is now called an information dark age, while Germany got the name "the land of poets and thinkers" as a result. ... settles it, doesn't it?
US has signed the Bern Convention, hence the European copyright rules hold for european works, even in the USA.
No. We signed it but don't take it seriously. The Berne (there's an extra 'e') Convention has no independent legal effect here. Copyright is fundamentally national law; each nation might be obligated under the treaty to pass particular laws, but they're meant to do it themselves.
In the US we even have a law that says that Berne is not a law that people can enforce. It's 17 USC 104(c), if you're curious.
We also don't comply with it. Our "moral rights" statute at 17 USC 106A is mere lip service and our infamous exceptions to copyright at 17 USC 110(5) (allowing for public performance of certain works without a license) not only violates it, but there was a lawsuit against the US at the WTO, we lost, and we still haven't done a damn thing about it because we don't care.
Sucks that so many people here talk trash who never even bothered to learnt the basics about copyright how greatly it differs in other countries from the stupid american idea of "work for hire".
I'm a lawyer, practiced copyright law for years, not only did I study it in regular law school, but also got a master's degree in it. I'm reasonably familiar with how it differs. I also know that the US has the best fundamental principles of copyright law, even if our implementation is lacking, and that the entire European copyright model is crap. Knowing more than the basics helps me talk a higher level of trash.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.