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Your IP Address is Blocked from www.gutenberg.org

We apologize for this inconvenience. Your IP address has been automatically blocked from the address you tried to visit at www.gutenberg.org. This is because the geoIP database shows your address is in the country of Germany.

Diagnostic information:

Your IP address: <redacted>

Referrer URL (if available): http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/latest-covers

Time (GMT): Saturday, 03-Mar-2018 21:19:12 GMT

Why did this block occur?

A Court in Germany ordered that access to certain items in the Project Gutenberg collection are blocked from Germany. Project Gutenberg believes the Court has no jurisdiction over the matter, but until the issue is resolved during appeal, it will comply.

For more information about the German court case, visit PGLAF's information page about the German lawsuit.

For more information about the legal advice Project Gutenberg has received concerning international issues, visit PGLAF's International Copyright Guidance for Project Gutenberg

How can I get unblocked?

All IP addresses in Germany are blocked. This block will remain in place until legal guidance changes.

If your IP address lookup is incorrect

Use the Maxmind GeoIP demo to verify status of your IP address. Project Gutenberg updates its listing of IP addresses approximately monthly.

> A Court in Germany ordered that access to certain items in the Project Gutenberg collection are blocked from Germany... until the issue is resolved during appeal, [Project Gutenberg] will comply.

This is really misleading. It implies -- nay, outright states -- that Gutenberg is merely complying with the court order. But the court did not order the entire site to be blocked.

A more candid answer is found in their information page:[1]

Q: Why block all of Germany, rather than just those 18 books?

A: ...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... Blocking Germany, in an effort to forestall further legal actions, seems the best way to protect the organization and retain focus on its mission.

[1] https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html

PG decided they don't have time to deal with Germany's BS, so they implemented the simplest solution guaranteed to work.

More like retaliated to make a point.

For comparison, if they faced a U.S. publisher demand to block some books that were in violation, and in response they blocked all of the U.S., it would be misleading to suggest this was merely the "simplest solution".

You quoted them selectively to make your retaliation point. The full quote from the FAQ presents a very good argument, allowing access from a hostile legal jurisdiction could encourage thousands of cases and bankrupt the project:

>There are thousands of eBooks in the Project Gutenberg collection that could be subject to similar over-reaching and illigitimate actions.

>PGLAF is a small volunteer organization, with no income (it doesn't sell anything), other than donations. 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.

If German courts maintains that making content available in Germany (ie, putting it on the Internet) gives them jurisdiction over your organisation, your choices are to be compliant with German law, or not to be available in Germany. PGLAF does not have the budget, nor the philosophical inclination to be compliant with German law, so that leaves one option. As you quoted in your GP, they have no reason to believe this will end with these 18 works, so the alternative really is compliance, not just blocking 18 works.

I'm sure PGLAF will welcome a German spin-off that makes works available in a manner compliant with German law, they just don't have the resources to be that place.

(Oh, and so what if they retaliated? Seems like a perfectly reasonable excuse for a bit of theatrics.)

That would only be the case if they thought the 18 books would be the end of the matter.

Quite obviously, it would not, so blocking all of Germany is the correct move to prevent any future cases under the same legal theories.

They don't want to be under German jurisdiction; the German court has said that serving users in Germany puts them under German jurisdiction; therefore they are no longer serving users in Germany. This seems like it should satisfy everyone concerned.

You're getting downvoted because it sounds like you're defending the plaintiffs, but you're essentially right. They could have minimized disruption to German users by removing the affected books and committing to remove other books upon request. They instead chose to respond in a very broad way that will draw a lot of attention.

Which, I want to be clear, is a good thing. PG is absolutely in the right here, and this response is well-calculated to raise awareness and put their attackers in the spotlight.

The simplest solution would have been to do nothing.

They still have to comply with the court ruling, i.e. at least block those 18 books in Germany, as they aren't The Pirate Bay. The website's move is smart because it avoids future complications coming from the Urheberrechtsgesetz, the German copyright law, and draws much-needed public attention to how easy it is for bully firms to abuse it.

The Q and A contradicts this.

>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.

According to the ruling, the CEO wouldn't be liable personally unless the violation is willful. Which, having been adjudicated in German court, it now would be. If the CEO becomes personally liable then found in contempt, he would have to avoid travel to Germany. That's a lot to ask of a volunteer.

How come they have to obey the court in Germany?

Copyright laws are to be respected whatever the country. This is a border case, so to see if the principle is sound, let's imagine something. Let's say a country, for whatever reason, decides that its copyright protections are of 1 year only. After that, this country decides that all books, movies, games are freely available from its territory through the internet because their copyrights are expired. Does anyone believes that all the other countries will say : "no problem, it's their law and the site is from their territory, so everything's allright" ? So, laws from any country have to be respected, especially with a global system like the internet. It is often annoying, sometimes disconcerting, but no country would allow their society to be governed by foreign laws. And I really appreciate even more the Project Gutenberg for that, because they care about laws everywhere and obey them according to the territory (the fact that they went for the easy way by blocking the entire country is really not important: it is just a matter of resources, so we have to donate more if this is what bothers us).

Is the country with the one-year copyrights a Berne Convention signatory?

If so, then it is in violation of the treaty, which sets a minimum term for copyrights. The WIPO may adjudicate and other signatories may take action.

If not, then what you have is a national sovereignty issue. Other countries can restrict trade with the one with different laws, but they can't directly stop it from refusing to be similar to them (without a military invasion!).

This is currently the situation with things like online gambling. It's legal in some parts of the world, and in others the citizens accessing the sites may be prosecuted, but the sites themselves are usually beyond the reach of the disapproving countries - often the USA.

I should note that it is totally possible to have two countries with CONTRADICTORY laws that cannot be simultaneously satisfied. How would you deal with that situation, if all must be respected?

You're giving an ethical reason, but I'm more interested in the actual consequences of a US entity ignoring a German court ruling. I'm not sure what teeth this court actually has with regard to American citizens.

No one really wants to antagonize the court system of another country for ever, so this gives the German courts some teeth. In this case Project Gutenberg is saying they are complying because they want an appeal and that the courts would look unfavourably on them if they just ignored the original order.

That would be risky for the people running Project Gutenberg, since Germany and the US have extradition treaties.

Unlikely to be extradited for an extra-territorial claim. But the members of the executive and the board might not want to strike Germany from their list of travel destinations forever.

It says "ordered that access to certain items..." I don't see anything misleading, or any implication that the court ordered the whole site blocked. I think it is obvious that only a few items were ordered to be blocked but they decided to block the whole site

I thought it was pretty clear. They specifically say "certain items" were to be blocked, not the entire website.

This is answered in the FAQ at the bottom of the article. Essentially because this sets a precedent that Germany believes it can sue over anything in the german language and other items in the library might potentially cause the same kind of lawsuit it's better to just block everything instead.

> Germany believes it can sue over anything in the german language

You did not read the ruling (carefully). The language of the books was not discussed at all. It was discussed whether the offer (to download books) is directed to people in Germany.

Project Gutenberg said "NO", because they use a .org domain. (Obviously trying to claim that Germans only visit .de domains and neglecting the fact that .org is really trying to stress international coverage)

The court ruled "YES" because

- Project Gutenberg explicitly mentions to be available worldwide (before the geo blocking resulting from this very case)

- Project Gutenberg has some of its Web site translated into German. (In court they argued they did that to address US users, because German is the 3rd biggest foreign language in the US. The court did not accept that argument.)

Furthermore it was counted against them that project Gutenberg advises on its web site that users must check local copyright laws before downloading, because downloading might be illegal according to local laws.

Taking these points into account I must say the court ruling was logical from a legal viewpoint. Project Gutenberg had only lame excuses and in fact denied their own mission in court.

The real issue is that incompatible country laws don't fit at all with Internet (unless you propose a Chinese big (fire)wall). But I don't see any improvements any time soon, a certain president just declared last week that trade wars are the way to go.

Why doesn't Austria have jurisdiction for German content, do they not speak German in Austria? Do UK courts have jurisdiction over companies which produce content in English? It's absurd to think that an element to establishing jurisdiction is the language content is produced in.

They said they have jurisdiction because the contents is directed (also) to users in Germany. They said nothing about exclusive jurisdiction or exclusively directed to Germany. They also ruled that access to the average user in Germany must not be easy (acknowledging that the user decided to download can circumvent it.) There was not a word about making the contents available to users in any other country.

In the context of existing copyright laws the ruling is understandable. It's just plain nonsense to have contradicting copyright laws in the age of a global internet. And if you say that copyright should only be enforced according to the country of the distributor then you just move all contents to a country that does not enforce at all. But isn't it just the US that complains a lot about (their) IP not enforced in China or Vietnam?

As you surmise, I have not read the ruling. I was basing my understanding from the following in the article:

> Q: Why didn't Project Gutenberg block access until the Court made its judgement?

> A: PGLAF's legal advisors disagree that any foreign Court or entity has jurisdiction over its actions regarding copyright. The Court in Germany has promoted a theory that it has jurisdiction, mainly because the www.gutenberg.org site has some content in the German language. ...

> Q: So the court thinks that the presence of content in German means that courts in Germany have jurisdiction, regardless of the fact that PGLAF is entirely in the US?

> A: Yes, that was the original basis of the claim for jurisdiction, which the Court accepted in their judgement. Since then, there some more recent decisions in the European Court of Justice, and other German courts, that support this theory based on a Web site being accessible from a country. I.e., if a Web site is accessible from Germany, there are some cases where German courts claimed jurisdiction over that site, even though it was operated, and based, outside of Germany. These cases involve companies that actually operate (for-profit) in Europe, and the cases were between two European countries (i.e. part of the EU). They are not consistent with prior laws and cases, even in Europe, and also not consistent with provisions of the Berne Convention and other international law.

Prededents.

Further lawsuits against PG for any of the other German texts could bankrupt the organization.

I disagree - it's not at all clear. Most people reading the statement would assume that the book they were trying to access was among the 'certain items' blocked by the court.

I'm currently in Germany. The notice appears when trying to access any part of the catalog, even the search. Thus, I don't think this is an issue.

It also appears for the URL they give in the FAQ for donations :-(

As the block page states, the court order states that certain items must be blocked - it does not specify the means by which it must be accomplished. Blocking German IPs is the simplest way to achieve that.

The block is indeed in place, but trivially circumvented using a VPN.

Please e careful with your mirror. You are now susceptible to the same lawsuit as the original Project Gutenberg. I am not sure where you are in the world, but Germany has legal assistance treaties with the US/UK/Scandanavia, all EEC and Schengen countries.

https://www.congress.gov/treaty-document/108th-congress/27/d... https://www.mlat.info/mlat-index

Based on how media companies sue German torrent sharers (it's a cash cow for the law firms, like the one that is involved here, Waldorf Frommer), they sue individuals for making copyrighted content available on the internet -- because when you're torrenting something other people can get the completed parts from your computer, so if you run a mirror which is accessible from Germany, you will probably get a letter from the above law firm.

Yep, they are serious business, not one of the dodgy ones that send out as many threatening letters as possible and hope that a few pay. They'll actually go to court, or did so in the past, with a huge army of lawyers. When the "fliegende gerichtsstand" was abolished they got more selective with which cases they actually took to court, depending on the city they'd have to go to. Before, all cases were handled in Munich, and the judges there were pretty much rubber-stamping the cases in favor of WF.

> if you run a mirror which is accessible from Germany

Access from Germany isn't the issue, having a German IP is the issue. They don't go after foreign seeders because that would be too much hassle getting the real data behind the IP (just like German law doesn't apply to them), but they hunt down seeders with German IP's with quite a vengeance.

PG is a US organization. They may have volunteer mirrors in Germany, but all of PG itself is in San Francisco, right?

Now we're mixing up 2 issues... torrents of copyrighted content with German seeders, and e-books of copyrighted content (at least copyrighted in Germany) with a website provider.

They only go for German seeders because asking a foreign ISP for the address of someone who used a particular IP address at a particular date and time would probably get them the middle finger as a reply. In the case of PG, they know who is making the copyrighted content available in Germany, because PG has an address on their website.

And a German court said it's within their jurisdiction.

If you run a mirror with your contact information available, presumably they will contact you next.

> Waldorf Frommer

Oh they are still around?! Someone should shut them down and jail for the mere reason of the enourmous amount of paper they waste on trolling letters.

I've seen them squeeze 1000 Euro out of so many people (usually the sum they go for, making it a tad more expensive than a defence lawyer would cost you). It's a sad state of affairs.

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.

You mirror sage, but your site still links to sage.org, which seems to be defunct AFAICT, current is http://www.sagemath.org

Wouldn’t this be a good use case for IPFS? Then we could share the traffic and don’t have a single point of failure.

Sure, I don’t see why not. How involved is the process of putting the data onto IPFS?

I am not blocked. I could've even download "Der Vater" one of the eBooks from the case.

And yes german copyright laws are a fucking joke.

> copyright laws are a fucking joke.

Fixed that for you :-)

German ones are a particularly dark one.

How are German ones worse? I always think of Disney and Mosanto when I think about litigious companies..

The German copy right law was quite noticeable written with companies in mind, and had originally a right to private copies to get private people out of the reaches of the law. You could copy an entire book, or a movie, give it to a friend and that would be perfectly legal. (As long as you are clearly not doing that in any kind of commercial fashion.)

Early in the last decade, judges ruled that this basically never applies to anything internet, with the result that the entire copyright law is applicable. That would not be a big problem, except the entire law is written with the idea that both parties have already lawyers on staff. One example is the "Abmahnung," the way copy right disputes are meant to be resolved is, the lawyer of anybody who believes their copy right to be infringed sends a letter that tells the other guy to stop that, pay damages and sign a contract to never do that again. The escalation of that is, when you receive such a letter, then you sue against the "Abmahnung" and the judge who hears the case also decides about the original infringement. Trouble is, you are now suing and therefore the court is wherever the people who send the "Abmahnung" in the first place reside -- not a big problem if you are an large company in the first place.

You are misinformed on many levels.

You can still copy copyrighted data and send it to a friend over the internet, just like you can copy a book cover to cover and give the copy to a friend. The focus is on friend, however. When you torrent and connect to strangers, then it is public distribution and not anymore sharing between friends.

Also, the law § 104a UhrG clearly states that copyright infringement has to be brought to the local court of the defendant, when the defendant is a natural person. This is the case since the 9th October 2013.

Please don't spread wrong information.

I can still access it. No proxies or VPNs of any kind, just regular Telekom DSL.

According to heise.de, only IPv4 users are affected so far.

If you are using IPv6, you are still able to access it.

Oh, wow.

Yes, it works here with IPv6.

Also Telekom DSL, not blocked.

edit: Sorry: Only the frontpage isn't, search and books are ...

Can confirm block in O2 network, I can visit the homepage but access no books.

Try to access a book.

Works fine.

geofencing is not perfect.

Can confirm it. All books are blocked even though the front page is accessible.

Ah, maybe that explains the conflicting reports. Can you at least search for books and see results?

I can still open the full text of the offending books as html and as plain text. The EPUB and Kindle files are blocked, however. Maybe that's why there are conflicting reports.

Browsing indices works, however search is blocked as well.

IPv6?

Ot: what are the logistics of running a pg mirror, traffic and space wise?

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Mirroring_How-To

Works (Search, lookup, random German authors) fine for me.

PS: I'm surfing with (mostly) this configuration:

http://12bytes.org/tech/firefox/firefoxgecko-configuration-g...

No idea, if this might affect the outcome. IMHO, not.

Did you actually open a book? Because everything else is not blocked.

Several. HTML versions though. Might be IPv6 as mentioned above.

Sad...

I am not using a VPN or anything and can access http://www.gutenberg.org/ just fine from germany (including access to books). Not sure why though.

I'm German and I can access it, and that book all of Mann's other books.

I'm not a lawyer, but you may be seeing a cease and desist letter in your near future.

BTW, you may want to make sure you aren't keeping logs including traffic sources' IP addresses.

i doubt it.

How big is the data?

I think that is also a good case for hosting this on ZeroNet, the internet as it should be : P2P and decentralized.

Confirmed. Download pages are blocked. But reachable via non german VPN servers. Seems like money rules the world - sad...

Stuff like this makes me want to run a mirror too.

If I may ask, how much disk capacity does running a Gutenberg mirror currently take?

Works fine for me. Seems like the block is not active at the moment.

Edit: Individual books are blocked.

>Edit: Individual books are blocked.

Vodafone?

DSL from Easybell.

>Can someone who is in Germany actually confirm this block is in place?

Cannot confirm it, Gutenberg.org works fine for me.

Edit: tried 3 different ISPs, no issues.

Edit 2: Tried accessing books, this was blocked for 1/3.

Interesting, thanks. I wonder if the block was more localized then all of Germany, if it was simply misconfigured, or if they just decided to stop blocking the traffic.

They only block the books themselves, not the index pages. Attempting to view any book will result in a block message.

I'm on one of the biggest German ISPs (Deutsche Telekom) and I can access front page and books just fine.

Tried it with the HTML versions of four different books, among them "most popular" like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and A Tale of Two Cities, they all work without issue.

Vodafone/Kabel Deutschland doesn't seem to be blocked either. (I tried a couple from the 18 that are supposed to be blocked.)

Unitymedia doesn't seem to be blocked either.

Works fine for me for all books I tested. Can you name some specific ones which are blocked for you?

The top ten of the top 100 list are all blocked, as well as many random books in several random languages.

All of them work for me, same with the search function or even the actual 18 books. Same ISP as freeflight. Well, that's interesting...

It still works for me and I can access the content of books. My provider is unitymedia.

Can anything be made using ipfs?

Isn't IPFS peer to peer? Then it would be no different than using Torrent clients. Users would be just noticed or sued individually.

Certainly, given that each ebook could be a static hash. But you'd need to revise index pages periodically. And I'm not sure how search could be implemented. Except through Google, which does index pages from https://ipfs.io/ipfs/ . However, I gather that IPFS respects take-down requests, so you might need to use another gateway.

I just tried and it was not blocked. maybe the block does not work on IPv6..

Same here on 1&1.

Thanks for the mirror!

I get ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR

Still works for me

They probably blocked some version of Mein Kampf, which they have every right to do and ought to do.

Why? I hate everything Hitler stood for. I read mein kampf it did not change my opinion.

The authors and books are listed in the linked faq. None seem politically related, although I don't know German.

Read them in the original. They are not pleasant and bringing up the memory of those things is just as bad as causing them.