Slashdot Mirror
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.
What a bunch of Copyright Naz......
First 20 years free. Then an escalating payment is required for each 20 year renewal afterward. Simply requiring a payment will solve the orphan works problem. This solution also lets Disney keep Mickey under copyright forever if they keep paying the escalating renewal fees. This is a simple solution to keeping commercially profitable works under copyright and letting everything else revert to the public domain.
America is the driving force behind copyright extensions and indeed copyright itself all over the world. This is just one of very few situations where works are locked away longer in a foreign country than in the USA.
The outrageous part isn't really the ruling... that's about access, and while it's problematic, the root outrage here should be the ridiculous length of copyright in the western world in general, companies still profiting or restricting access and it's decades after the author has passed
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
American courts were first to apply american rules to the whole world for their own benefit. Now when the role are reversed an american website tell us it's now all bad. I say at this point this is only justice an American organisation feel a bit of heat. Also, them thinking they are somehow essential to the whole world is typical american hubris.
*Shrug*
Tell that to Kim Dotcom, a German born New Zealand citizen and resident, about the US copyright.
You should be able to break German law all you like if you don't have anything to do with Germany.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
No, the issue is that every outlying country shouldn't get to determine worldwide copyright law for everyone else on the internet. It's bad enough that the U.S. has such sway on internet copyright. Now Germany wants to take it even further?
So what happens when Botswana decides that copyright lasts forever, huh?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"While writers and publishers deserve fair compensation, "
But not their great grand-children.
I don't know what to think because the article doesn't even describe what enforcement options are open to Germany in this case. Of course Germany can claim whatever jurisdiction they want. They could claim copyright protection on Jupiter's moons for all I care. The only thing that matters is what enforcement options the US government provides Germany based on our trade agreements and other arrangements.
The article seems to say that there isn't anything Germany can do other than pressure the US government to do something, so if that is true I could hardly care less about this ruling. China and Russia and Europe (and wherever) can make whatever crazy rules they want as long as the US government doesn't allow US companies and citizens to be restricted by them while operating outside of those countries.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I agree that copyright terms are a problem, but as long as they're the law, I don't see the problem with forcing websites to conform to the standard, assuming that all they're being asked for is blocking by IP.
Project Gutenberg claimed that the German language works are for consumption of German readers in the US, so blocking German users seems to be in line with that.
Except that the authors of the books are German, and under contract with German publishers. I would agree if this had nothing to do with Germany, but that would be really hard to argue in this case.
And why, o enlightened slashdot poster, should the US have the right to determine internet copyright, but nobody else?
The authors of the books were also under contract to publish the books in the United States, and elsewhere, and in those jurisdictions the books have since entered the public domain. In the United States, from which Project Gutenberg operates, the books in question entered the public domain prior to the equivalent in Germany. If the authors had only published in Germany, the German court would clearly have jurisdiction. As they entered multiple agreements contractually, it's not so clear as the plaintiff claims.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
The authors of these books have been dead for 60+ years. I don't they have valid contacts with anyone, not that the existence of such contacts has anything to do with the enforceability of copyrights.
In this particular case the authors of the books are dead, and have been pushing up daisies for a very long time.
It's ridiculous to keep copyright enforced so long after the authors are gone. Copyright should expire; it's a sad testament to greed that these ridiculous lawsuits aren't thrown out.
Gutenberg was german, he invented the printed press process with movable type, which effectively took literacy as a skill away from nobles and the church and started a revolution of book access to the masses. He died largely unknown and with merrits unrecognized.
As of February 2018, there are 175 states that are parties to the Berne Convention. This includes 172 UN member states plus the Cook Islands, the Holy See and Niue.
That's a creative way of dancing around the fact that the United States is not a party to it.
Basically, there are a bunch of people who just want stuff for free.
* The Gutenberg crowd wants people to give them their books for nothing.
* The publishers want people to give them money for nothing.
You're all a bunch of wankers.
The US Constitution grants the power to the Government "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Note "for a limited Times". It's the right of the creator of a work to get paid for it for awhile, but after a time it is owned by Humanity and yes, everyone should be able to copy it for free. All Project Gutenberg seems to want is for the "limited Times" to not keep getting extended indefinitely, and to be judged under the Constitution of the country in which they live and operate.
E pluribus unum
You've got that the wrong way around...
Imagine having to obey Singapore's littering laws in the United States.
Suppose you bought a brand of tissue available in both Singapore and the United States.
The packaging has a label that contains English, Malay, Tamil, and Mandarin.
You then discarded it in a public area in the United States.
You post videos to Facebook and someone in Singapore notices you discarding a tissue.
You then receive notice that you have a trial date in Singapore because the brand of tissue is available there.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Read this image and realize the fail of your "fix". The reality is, you cannot graduate high school, enter college, or even apply for the vast amount of white-collar jobs in China without at least a moderate level of English mastery. China wants to learn English - desperately - because it IS the de-facto International language.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Why should Project Gutenberg have to block German users? If Germany wants to go to the expense of building a Great Firewall, let it do so.
and in those jurisdictions the books have since entered the public domain.
No they have not. If at all the english translations "might" have.
The USA is a signer of the Bern Convention, hence the original German acts are still under copyright.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You have to sue where the violation took place, and it has to be based on violation of the law where the violation took place. Which is exactly what I said.
The Berne convention requires that a country extend their own copyright law protections to works made in other signatory countries, ensuring that they are treated with the same amount of protection that they would have if they had been made locally. It does not extend the reach of any country's copyright laws over citizens of any other country.
For example, suppose U.S. law changed so that copyright lasted for life + 200 years, but India law only allowed only for the Berne minimum (life + 50). Under the terms of the Berne Convention, my copyright would still expire in India 50 years after I die, not 200. You get the minimum term of the country of origin or the country where the copies were made.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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?
That people follow the law, simple and easy. The internet is not outside the law.
Maybe because the people running the site don't want to worry about being extradited, or arrested every time they enter an airport.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Leaving aside the obvious truism that by definition *modern* anything didn't exist in the 18th century, corporations certainly existed long before - notably the British & Dutch East India Companies.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It doesn't have to be registered, but it does have to be stated.
Night of the Living Dead entered public domain the moment it was released because they never included the copyright notice on the title card.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Google never had plans to do that. From the outset, Google always said it was just scanning the books to make them searchable, not downloadable (save for works in the public domain).
Making orphan works available was the Authors Guild's idea, but it was shot down by the judge because the AG didn't have sufficient authority to make that kind of deal.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Not true.
It *did* have to be stated, but that is no longer the case. Inclusion of notice per regulations precludes certain infringement defenses (e.g. innocent infringement), but no notice is required by U.S. law.