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Comment by cosmos0072 | Hacker News Reader

From Italy, https://www.gutenberg.org/ gives a 404 error and https://gutenberg.org/ opens a very official-looking page stating "police notice. This site is under judicial seizure" and references a sentence number: "criminal proceedings 52127/20 R.N.R.I. tribunal of Rome"

Any idea what's happening? I thought PG published public domain books...

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Found: it's a sentence from 2020, and PG decided not to appeal (!?)

Full story (in Italian) at https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2020/06/30/progetto-gutenb...

Seems like a case for HTTP 451 (Unavailable for Legal Reasons) rather than 404.

HTTP 666 (We're evil) seems more fitting here.

It looks like the issue was that, in Italy, copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author or the first translator of a work.

PG works based on US copyright law. And as I understand it that's also 70 years after author/translator death. My gut feeling is that if anyone tried hard enough this ban could probably get lifted

That’s only the case for works published after the mid-70s. For works published before (which is all current PD books in the US), it’s 95 years after the date of publication, with a few exceptions where people failed to file renewal notices.

A silly legal tribunal confused PG with pirate sites. We sent the tribunal a letter pointing out their error but it was ignored. The block was served on local dns providers so many Italian users evade the block by using DNS from Google or Cloudflare.

It was also blocked in Germany for a while due to a court order https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html

The Alfred Döblin books are still blocked in Germany (for a couple more years).

I asked Claude to research the background story: "In May 2020, the Court of Rome ordered Italian ISPs to seize/block a list of domains as part of a criminal case (the 52127/20 R.N.R. you're seeing) targeting sites and Telegram channels distributing pirated newspapers and magazines. 28 domains were on the list, and Project Gutenberg got thrown in alongside the actual pirate sites."

apparently this situation hasn't been resolved yet

> I asked Claude

Please don't do this.

Quote an authoritative source, not some AI bot known for ~~hallucinating~~ bullshitting.

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