Project Gutenberg is no longer fully blocked in Germany
They settled their 2015 lawsuit and will only be blocking these specific works.
More information and Background: https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html
More information and Background: https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html
109 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadI 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 people from Germany that didn't know how to use a VPN. German courts really don't get how the internet works.
‘Public domain’ doesn’t exist in Germany.
You cannot give up all rights voluntarily.
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.
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.
Even if Germany should decide to be unreasonable and claim global jurisdiction, it should either bar the offending individuals from entering altogether or grant them immunity under German law during their stay for anything done outside the country beforehand. Knowingly inviting someone in only to prosecute them would be a gross violation of the basic principles of hospitality.
If Germany doesn't want certain data coming in to their country they are welcome to erect a firewall at their border, at their own expense, to prevent their own residents from accessing it. Of course that still infringes the natural rights of the German residents, but that is an internal matter between the German government and those living there, who presumably would be permitted to leave if they so desired. It is not the place of non-German server operators to enforce German censorship laws, including but not limited to copyright.
Why should every government copy what US does?
It's pretty interesting but the current global norm for copyright duration is, due to circumstance, almost entirely based on German norms.
I thought it was Elvis Presley.
So the US adopted everybody else's rules but has an escape hatch for older works - that only applies in the US and this is where the contention over these 3-5 works comes from.
The US later extended the "70 years" rule for anonymous, pseudonymous and work-for-hire works to cover 95 years since publication or 120 years since creation (whatever happens first) because The Mouse squeaked[2].
I'd prefer Germany not to adopt that one.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
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, neither German legislation nor the Fischer Verlag are at fault here. It's just the way it is (in Germany): Creators hold their intellectual property for life and can make sure, their heir profits from the work of the (grand)parents, as well (+70 years after death of copyright holder).
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.
I am very happy, that this has been resolved now. All the legal hassle has cost (non-profit) money and was worthless, because the solution is the same now, they could have implemented seven years ago.
We are always complaining about China that they do not fully honor IP. I believe it is an ethical thing to do to honour the laws of the country were sth was originally created even if strictly legally speaking I can move around the world to circumvent unpleasant jurisdiction.
Works are "gemeinfrei" (approx. "public domain") 70 years after the author's death, or 70 years after publication for non-natural persons holding a copyright (e.g. corporate copyright).
What you might think of is that there's no official way for an author to release works into the public domain in Germany.
That, and the life+70 idea, comes from the personality rights angle that underlies German (and other European) copyright: Personality rights are protected for 70 years after death, probably under the assumption that everybody who cares deeply about a person (instead of being potentially offended in some abstract sense) is also gone by then. Works are considered an embodiment of the personality of their author, and so they receive the same kind of protection. Just as you can't give away your personality rights, you can't give away all rights to your work[1]. Their commercial value, while more important these days, played a secondary role in the creation of this concept.
In comparison, the Anglo-Saxon copyright tradition (based on Statute of Anne of 1710[2]) cares primarily about protecting the commercial value and exploitation rights of the works, with little concern about how "remixes could attack the honor of the author"[3] or anything like that.
[1] Of course you can trade away commercial exploitation rights.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
[3] To paint the German position with a very broad brush
The idea it can't be done is a trope at this point, but I am frankly skeptical.
Moral rights to recognition aside, copyright can be sold, like any other property. Why do we think it can't be abandoned, again like any other property?
---
Section 42 Right of revocation for changed conviction
(1) The author may revoke a right of use vis-à-vis the rightholder if the work no longer reflects his conviction and he can therefore no longer be expected to agree to the exploitation of the work. The author’s successor in title (section 30) may exercise the right of revocation only if he can prove that the author would have been entitled to exercise this right prior to his death and that he was prevented from exercising the right or provided for its exercise by testamentary disposition.
(2) The right of revocation may not be waived in advance. Its exercise may not be precluded.
... (more stuff that is about compensation and how you can't use this clause to just start to exploit the works on your own after taking it out of circulation, but not relevant here) ...
---
Putting stuff into the public domain would either mean:
- that an author waives their right to revocation in advance (that "rightholder" would be the public, I guess), but that's explicitly forbidden by (2) or
- that they can claw back the work from the public domain, which keeps the work in some weird state where it's PD-unless-the-author-objects.
The only way to put a work into something that is somewhat similar to the public domain under German copyright (without dying and waiting for 70 years) is to publish it anonymously with a dedication to the public, so that redistribution etc is clear, and then remove all traces that you authored it (e.g. drafts, notes, ...) - and even then it falls back to you if somebody starts digging and finds proof of authorship (§66 (2) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__66.html, english translation https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_ur...). Any legal conscious redistributor wouldn't touch something like that with a 10 foot pole.
Just use CC0, it's cleaner.
As for
> Why do we think it can't be abandoned, again like any other property?
You can't sell yourself into slavery. That's the category personality rights operate in. Does it make sense for copyrights? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Which is probably fine for most text. Although note that CC0 was withdrawn from consideration by the OSI as a software license primarily because of issues around the patent language. (Basically the license does not grant patent rights which, depending on one's position about implicit grants, may or may not be an issue.) MIT-0 may be a better choice for software as a result.
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.
On an international scale, the situation is more complicated. Rougly speaking, the range for the duration of copyright is from "life + 50 yrs" up to "life + 100 yrs". Wikipedia has a list of these.[1] There are many countries where works from up to the early 1970s are already in the public domain that are still under copyright protection in the U.S. for up to the next 20 years. In principle, problems may arise if the country in which a work is published in the Internet sets a shorter term of protection than the maximum term in this list.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...
They explain their rationale for this and it is a very sound one, it is not about the difficulty to block, it is about opening themselves to lawsuits. Here is the relevant quotes:
> Because the German Court has overstepped its jurisdiction, and allowed the world's largest publishing group to bully Project Gutenberg for these 18 books, there is every reason to think that this will keep happening. There are thousands of eBooks in the Project Gutenberg collection that could be subject to similar over-reaching and illigitimate actions.
> [...] There is every reason to fear that this huge corporation, with the backing of the German Court, will continue to take legal action. In fact, at least one other similar complaint arrived in 2017 about different books in the Project Gutenberg collection, from another company in Germany.
I agree with their assessment, once the German court decided that all international treaties and public domain basically don't exist, and decided that German courts have jurisdiction over the US, it means that ALL works on the project are equally "illegal" (or at least many, they can't know which ones), and therefore nothing on the whole site is safe to be accessible in Germany. Their only option was to block the whole site or open themselves to uncountable other lawsuits (and limitless amount of punitive damages).
As to how they reopened the site for Germany now, I can only speculate, but 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. With that the project decided that the risk of lawsuit is now low enough to allow for opening for Germany.
Note that the courts didn't ignore those treaties and or somehow ruled they weren't enforceable. They just have a different interpretation of the legal contents of those treaties than the PGLAF does. Law is often not black or white and anyone who claims there is just one true position doesn't tell you the whole truth. The issue is actually pretty interesting legally and there is a lot more subtlety to it than the claim that courts are somehow bending the law.
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.
I'm really trying hard not to whatabout this but tone of understanding at the copyright laws in Germany just got to me.
I don't follow. Aren't you describing German legislation's choice to have extremely long copyright periods? How do you conclude that German legislation not at fault here?
Just saying, the blocking was rather trivial to bypass.
Risking going off tangent, I highly doubt that would happen. When you work in a domain, your entire life becomes it, you slowly lose wider context and alternative perspective. I doubt there are many people who purposefully want to be the bad guys, it seems more like "learned indifference". Just like many people who eat meat on a daily basis but would be uncomfortable with a thought of a chicken being killed in a process (and some freak out from a sight of a live lobster in a restaurant tank). Maybe it's a negative side of the "flow" - losing some degree of empathy.
I wouldn't make that assumption at all. As with many other examples, such as GDPR-related geofencing, a good faith attempt to restrict access usually goes a long way even if it's possible for a savvy user to get around the blocks.
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, the public domain would be dramatically curtailed. All you would need is one rich country with strong legal ties to other nations and an appetite for perpetual copyright, and you would have a judgment mill by which you can make using any public domain content extremely risky.
The current status quo of country-by-country blocking may seem silly to people who know how to evade those blocks, but it makes courts happy and walls off the worst effects of copyright maximalism.
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).
"In 2002, the U.S. Congress passed the American Service-Members' Protection Act (ASPA), which contained a number of provisions, including authorization of the President to "use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court""
We live in a world largely run by multinational corporations who would prefer to continue operating in a world devoid of multinational jurisprudence.
laws can change, I'd personally love to see some of our politicians and military leadership get punished for lying to the American people and the damage they did to entire nations around the world. A lot of people my age feel the same, some of these people better hope they croak before a younger generation can hold them accountable
Furthermore, copyright is usually treated as a civil tort; and the US also has processes to domesticate and enforce foreign court orders under US jurisdiction should someone decide to play scofflaw. There's plenty of international cooperation that makes the whole concept of "jurisdiction ends at national borders" null and void.
[0] Not the real name of the act, but this is funnier.
[1] If you're curious, there are countries that object to criminal extradition. Notably, France considers French nationality to constitute immunity to any extradition treaty it signs. Though, they haven't promised to invade countries over it like the US did.
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.
German courts are aware of the existence of means to circumvent such a block but don't see that as a reason to not even try. See e.g BGH, 26.11.2015 - I ZR 174/14
As it happens I'm currently reading Thomas Man's English translation of Death in Venice from Gutenberg.
That doesn't seem to be included in the embargoed texts.
The block applies to seven books by author Thomas Mann (until January 1, 2026) and five books by author Alfred Döblin (until January 1, 2028). No other Project Gutenberg eBooks, by any author, are blocked in Germany.
I can confirm that works by Heinrich Mann are accessible.
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 users :(
Let’s fix this! Everyone reading this post should go download a nice book from PG and actually read it! ;)
The news that the blocking has been removed was reported yesterday by IT news sites (e.g. https://www.heise.de/news/Literaturportal-Project-Gutenberg-...), but it wasn't exactly front page news either...
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
Does Germany have any leverage over an institution that is fully based in the US?
If so, does it mean that, as a hypothetical website owner, I need to understand and be compliant with every law in every possible country, or risk fines / imprisonment?
This has literally always been the case. Some nations have legal statutes that they will not enforce a foreign judgement against their own citizens (such as the US shield against UK libel judgements) but you're on your own if you leave your country of residence. Plenty of US newspapers still block access to the UK of stories they feel legal risk from for example, because their owners would like to go on holidays sometimes.
Extra territorial enforcement is a lot more muddy than people think, but it's never, ever been the case that you're fine if you're incorporated in a different territory. If they can demonstrate that there's a body of people in their country accessing the site, then generally you are liable. It's just if the legal system considers that to be too much of a pain to worry about.
>If so, does it mean that, as a hypothetical website owner, I need to understand and be compliant with every law in every possible country, or risk fines / imprisonment?
By the letter of the law, yes. The idea of a borderless internet never had specific legal standing, it's just largely a convention on non-enforcement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Background
Quote from Wikipedia
Printing brought profound social changes. The rise in literacy across Europe led to a dramatic increase in the demand for reading matter. Prices of reprints were low, so publications could be bought by poorer people, creating a mass audience. In German language markets before the advent of copyright, technical materials, like popular fiction, were inexpensive and widely available; it has been suggested this contributed to Germany's industrial and economic success. After copyright law became established (in 1710 in England and Scotland, and in the 1840s in German-speaking areas) the low-price mass market vanished, and fewer, more expensive editions were published; distribution of scientific and technical information was greatly reduced.
And from the history arctile
Heinrich Heine, in a 1854 letter to his publisher, complains: "Due to the tremendously high prices you have established, I will hardly see a second edition of the book anytime soon. But you must set lower prices, dear Campe, for otherwise I really don't see why I was so lenient with my material interests."
It is not okay to claim other works as yours, publish private material or just don't give you a fair share upon your work. Probably we should have opted for another approach than "copyright" or "patents". Luckily the US at least got "Fair Use" and maybe the idea of a "Culture Flatrate" from Germany is also a good idea.
Hmm... it's not exactly "new" if it's older than the unified German state...
I think you're looking for Standard Ebooks [0][1], which utilizes (usually) Project Gutenberg-sourced text, original-edition illustrations, and volunteer editors to create professional, free-as-in-beer ebooks.
[0] https://standardebooks.org/
[1] I tend to write, or only ever see, "eBooks", but Standard Ebooks styles it "Ebooks". That's the only thing I don't like about them, and I really really don't like it. Given my uncontroversial acceptance of the capitalization used when starting a sentence with the word "Email", I imagine I'll live.
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.
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.
Why would a torrent site do the same?
https://www.brigadekomarlaheights.org.in/
ummm, what? Imagine if the UK, or US claimed jurisdiction over any website that published content in English.
* The website was accessible from Germany
* The website was partly translated into German
* The website offered German-language content
* The explicitly offered worldwide service ("anyone anywhere")
* There was a disclaimer directed at people not located in the US
> The website was accessible from Germany
That's something Germany could control much more easily on its own by putting firewalls at their borders. There is no reason for the site to go out of its way to block access from Germany, even assuming that they could do so reliably, which they can't.
> The explicitly offered worldwide service ("anyone anywhere")
Just like most web sites are available to "anyone anywhere". That's how the Internet is meant to work.
> There was a disclaimer directed at people not located in the US
Which is a very large group of people, most of whom are not in or from Germany. They're seriously complaining that the site reminded people that they need to take their own local laws into account before importing content from elsewhere?
According to German legal rules you always have to take an overall view into account, not only to each argument on its own. In this case, whether they intended to also(!) reach German users.
Anyway, 2016 the highest German civil court ruled in accordance to precedence from the European Court of Justice that copyright infringement on websites fall under German jurisdiction as long as 1) the website is accessible from Germany without circumventing any blocks 2) it's infringing according to German law. Showing that the website operator actually intends to reach German users is no longer necessary.