- Projekt Gutenberg-DE
Projekt Gutenberg-DE is a collection of German language literary texts, distributed via the web and on CD-ROM. It is run by a small publishing company called
Hille Partner , run byGunter Hille , and its web presence is hosted by the weekly magazineDer Spiegel .The name is based on
Project Gutenberg , a project that tries to make as many texts available for as many people as possible for as long as possible. Hille was the second person to ask Michael Hart, founder ofProject Gutenberg , to use the name and was granted permission.Projekt Gutenberg-DE claims
copyright s on all its products, although the legal basis for such claims are disputed. Courts in several jurisdictions with similar copyright laws have found that mere sweat of the brow does not generate a copyright. (See for instanceBridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. , which in turn seems to have built onFeist v. Rural .) Furthermore, the project only makes its etexts available gratis in a form in which readers have to browse the text page by page. This seems to fall short of Project Gutenberg's lofty bar of accessibility.In 2004, the German project was at the center of a controversy, because it had started running a proofreading website based on the
Distributed Proofreaders software, without mentioning that the resulting books would not be as free as those of the American project. People started proofreading in good faith, only to find out later that the fruits of their labour would receive a copyright claim and be sold, without remuneration going to the volunteers.External links
* [http://gutenberg.spiegel.de Website of Projekt Gutenberg-DE]
* [http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/54404 Heise News article in German, with the 2004 controversy discussed in the forums]
* [http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/de German etexts in the US-based Project Gutenberg]
* [http://www.digbib.org DigBib.Org, a free archive of German literature]
* [http://web.resist.ca/~nemesisa/ Nemesis-Archive of free German socialist literature]
* [http://energia.cl-ki.uni-osnabrueck.de/lit/gb_html.php An archive of German literature, based on Projekt Gutenberg-DE ebooks]
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