Re: quake2 and german youth protection law
* Michael Below ::
> Baltasar Cevc <baltasar@cevc-topp.de> writes:
[German text respectfully cut]
> § 15 Youth-Endangering Media
>
> (1) If the inclusion of media in the list of youth-endangering
> media has been announced according to § 24 par. 3 sentence 1, they
> may not be
>
> 1. offered, given to or otherwise made available to children or
> youth,
The German Debian mirror does, in fact, "otherwise make available"
the entire Quake2 for Debian GNU/Linux, without any age check
whatsoever. The only way I see to solve this is that the German
mirror erases automagically quake2*.deb from its mirror, including
the reference to it in Packages.gz and other similar content files.
The German mirror admin might want to see if any other packages
contain similarly censored speech (such as Nazi/racist propaganda
etc).
Alternatively, the German mirror could ask for some form of
authorization that proves the age of the downloader (like pr0n sites
do). It's terrible, but it's the law.
Or you could close the German mirror and German citizens would have
to download debian from other countries with less censoring laws.
>
> 2. displayed, demonstrated, advertised or made available at a
> place children or youth may enter or look into,
Nope. We don't do that.
>
> 3. distributed or offered on the street, in booths that customers
> usually don't enter, by mail-order or in commercial libraries,
Nope. We don't do that either.
>
> 4. rented or otherwise let commercially, except in shops that may
> not be entered or looked into by children or youth,
No, again.
>
> 5. imported by mail-order,
No.
>
> 6. offered, advertised or announced at a place that children or
> youth may enter or look into, or by distribution of media outside
> of the relevant trade,
This should be achieved by the Packages.gz censorship I mentioned.
>
> 7. produced, obtained, delivered, stocked or imported to be used
> according to No. 1 - 6, or to enable such use for another person.
>
> (3) Without need for inclusion in the list or announcement, the
> limitations of par. (1) also apply to media which is wholly or in
> the main the same as media whose inclusion in the list has been
> published.
This does not apply to debian*.deb, because none of those are in the
same media as Quake2 (the original id CDs). It's just a compatible
game engine that happens to play the game files on the original id
CDs.
>
> > I'm quite sure it's the data after having read the above.
>
> Probably the data is more problematic, yes. But see my other mail,
> I think the quake2 package plus the quake2-data installer could at
> least be constructed as an advertisement or announcement for Quake
> II.
It's not advertisement nor announcement, but it *is* "making
otherwise available", if your translation is correct.
--
HTH,
Massa
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