Adult ebooks not to be sold before 10 p.m in Germany

[ingmar]

Originally Posted by murg

So I presume that Netflix Germany (whenever it gets established) can only stream shows or movies rated as such between the legally mandated hours...

Netflix has been available in Germany since September last. In fact it's available in all of Western Europe, with the exception of Spain, Portugal and Italy (announced there).

It's an interesting question, and I don't know how they handle it (I'm not in Germany), but doesn't Netflix have parental controls? That would be an obvious way to comply with these regulations.

[cromag]

My quibble would be with the timing. The teens that I know have no trouble staying up past midnight, but I've never known any teen to voluntarily get out of bed before 10:00 AM (unless forced to get up and out to school). The restricted hours should be adjusted accordingly.

[FizzyWater]

Does Netflix have pornography??

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

Does Netflix have pornography??

They certainly offer many films I wouldn't watch due to graphic violence.

And yet I'm probably going to finish The Blitz tonight. I can't put my finger on a logical reason for thinking as I do, but I probably would think it OK for children to read this book, but undesirable for them to watch a war movie depicting the most disturbing scenes in the book.

As for the German language article, I can't find any other sources on this, and I don't trust machine translation. Are there English language articles yet?

[ingmar]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

As for the German language article, I can't find any other sources on this, and I don't trust machine translation. Are there English language articles yet?

I only found these two:

http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-n...-pm-in-germany

http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/0...pm-in-germany/

There are others in German, of course, but that won't help you much.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by cromag

My quibble would be with the timing. The teens that I know have no trouble staying up past midnight, but I've never known any teen to voluntarily get out of bed before 10:00 AM (unless forced to get up and out to school). The restricted hours should be adjusted accordingly.

Ah -- our voice of reason!

Presumably the lawmakers believe in childrens' bedtimes, they must be the only people on the planet that still do. What, are they all still 6 years old? I think I had a bedtime when I was still in elementary school...

Of course, I wouldn't have been able to buy any such stuff anyway. 9-12 at night is family Netflix time.

[FatDog]

I remember I was working for Shopzilla (a search site that directs you to sites that sell you stuff). We had a UK version of our site and it covered the UK, Germany and France.

One feature was we collected search-terms to see what people were looking for and published the top 10 things at the bottom of our web pages. Kind of like a shopping "Trending Now" feature.

About 5 years ago I was about to leave work and a manger from another department came over pleading for help. The German authorities were threatening to block our site because the "Trending Now" was showing that people in Germany were searching for a lot of kiddie porn. Since this appeared on every page - it looked like were were encouraging the searches. It made no difference to the Germans that this simply reflected top search terms by their countrymen. They wanted it removed or they would shut down our site in Germany.

I tend to work at the back-end of the website, not the web-facing part, but nobody could figure out where the filters we used were and how to code new regular expressions to squash kiddie porn searches from showing up in the top 10 search terms.

I quickly added any word with the term "Kinder" inside to the filter. This solved the immediate problem. But this also tossed out any terms for Childrens clothing, costumes, toys, etc.

I then spent the next day looking up porn terms in German. I had to go home to do the research because the company internet tended to block porn terms by computers inside the firewall. Eventually I managed to 'tune' the filters to remove the adult content in the German language from showing up on every page.

It was amusing and somewhat disturbing.

Basically - Germany has been fighting a large pornography problem for several years.

I am against censorship and I know that every radical, oppressive argument includes a "we must protect the children" argument. But putting some time-of-day restrictions on scheduled TV shows is something I grew up with in the US. Not allowing adult book stores to be within a few hundred yards of elementary schools ... I can support this (mainly because of some of the pervy guys who hang around these places).

This DOES smell like the authorities making a ridiculous rule - but it's focus is to generate buzz to send a message to other smut peddlers that someone in power is looking at things.

[dickloraine]

Child porn is not merely considered adult content in germany but a serious crime. By the way there is even a scandal right now about a politician accused of it.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by ingmar

I only found these two:

http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-n...-pm-in-germany

http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/0...pm-in-germany/

There are others in German, of course, but that won't help you much.

That's not going to answer Steve's questions. I worked from gTranslated version of about 4 articles, and the other guys didn't even do that much work.

[ingmar]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

That's not going to answer Steve's questions.

What exactly are his questions, apart from "are there any other English articles"? These are the only two I found. Obviously most material will be in German only.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by ingmar

What exactly are his questions, apart from "are there any other English articles"? These are the only two I found. Obviously most material will be in German only.

My point was that he wanted someone who could read German to report on the story (or that's what I thought he meant). Both of the English language reports were dependent on machine translation, so they're not much better than going to a German-language source.

[ingmar]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

My point was that he wanted someone who could read German to report on the story.

I thought I did just that? Not that I'm a journalist or anything, of course. Apart from that, there are numerous reports in German by now, but I am not aware of other articles in English by somebody who actually speaks German, sorry.

ETA: There's a new article in the Independent which may or may not be what you are looking for.