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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 Germa

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! ;)

weinzierl 5y ago
Yes, I was annoyed by it being blocked here.
- zmix 5y ago
  LOL, same here! But, AFAIK, nothing more happened, except us being extremely annoyed.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rob74 5y ago
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-wieder-von-Deutschland-aus-erreichbar-6228792.html https://www.heise.de/news/Literaturportal-Project-Gutenberg-...), but it wasn't exactly front page news either...
pgeorgi 5y ago
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/ https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/ [2] https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/info/texte/info.html https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/info/texte/info.html

weinzierl 5y ago

Yes, I was annoyed by it being blocked here.

zmix 5y ago
LOL, same here! But, AFAIK, nothing more happened, except us being extremely annoyed.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rob74 5y ago

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-wieder-von-Deutschland-aus-erreichbar-6228792.html https://www.heise.de/news/Literaturportal-Project-Gutenberg-...), but it wasn't exactly front page news either...

pgeorgi 5y ago

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/ https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/ [2] https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/info/texte/info.html https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/info/texte/info.html