Comment by willvarfar
5 years ago
Was there any general awareness in Germany the PG was blocked, and if so, did activism arise?
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! ;)
There's a German-language "Projekt Gutenberg"[1] as well, a long time maintained by the publisher Spiegel. They're the more popular project of that kind in Germany, so people probably didn't notice what Project Gutenberg was doing.
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
There was no general awareness AFAIK. I'm from Germany and only learnt about it when I went to their site to download a book I was interested in (back in 2019 I think), found out it was blocked, researched the reason, found out that they didn't actually have to block everything, got angry (partly at the plaintiffs, but mostly at PG for their "overcompliance"), then shrugged and downloaded the book from somewhere else. So if this overcompliance was really intended to "instrumentalize" their readers, like the plaintiffs said, then I guess they unfortunately overestimated their impact.
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...
Yes, I was annoyed by it being blocked here.
LOL, same here! But, AFAIK, nothing more happened, except us being extremely annoyed.