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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 24 2015, @05:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can't-make-this-up dept.

Techdirt reports that the German government, armed with a law that has its origin in more captive content (movies -- the kind shown in theatres) and attempting to apply it to the internet (ebook sales).

Heise.de (German) and Boersenblatt (German) reported on Friday and Thursday that the Jugendschutzbehörde (Youth Protection Authority) has handed down a new ruling which extended Germany's Youth Media Protection Law to include ebooks.

As a result of a lawsuit (legal complaint?) over the German erotica ebook Schlauchgelüste (Pantyhose Cravings), the regulators have decided that ebook retailers in Germany can now only sell adult ebooks between 10 pm and 6 am local time (4 pm and midnight, eastern US).


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @09:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @09:21AM (#200856)

    The measure isn't meaningful because it's puritan nonsense.

    You're confusing the measure with the goal. What you do is to criticize the goal. But whether a method is meaningful is completely independent of whether the goal you try to achieve with it is worthwhile.

    For example, you surely will agree that maximizing the number of deaths is not a worthwhile goal. Nevertheless throwing a nuclear bomb over every major city of the world is a meaningful method to achieve that goal (assuming you have the power to do so). On the other hand, just asking all people to kill themselves is not a meaningful method to achieve it.

    In the case here, the goal is to prevent children from having access to porn. You can argue whether that is a worthwhile goal, or a misguided one, but that's irrelevant for the question of whether the measure of only selling it in the night is a meaningfol method to do it. To decide that, you have to look at whether it does what it is meant to do, namely prevent children having access to porn.