Re: Bug#283976: ITP: simnazi -- historical city simulation game, clone of Sim City
* Josselin Mouette [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2004-12-02 19:00]: SimNazi is an isometric city simulation. The object of SimNazi is to keep your citizens under your thumb, and manage to generate enough resources and soldiers to withstand the hardships of WWII. The game play is centered around what if hitler had developed Nuclear Weapons first?, or What if the Nazi army had beed supplied better and the allies were unable to discontinue their supply chain?. It is the Goal of SimNazi to be as historicaly accurate as possible. Even if the upstream hompage states IS NOT RACIST OR TO BE INTENDED AS SUCH I think this qualifies for a violation of the Austrian Verbotsgesetz 1947, veröffentlicht im StGBl. Nr. 13/1945 idF.: BGBl. Nr. 148/1992 Nach § 3g wird auch bestraft, wer in einem Druckwerk, im Rundfunk oder in einem anderen Medium oder wer sonst öffentlich auf eine Weise, daß es vielen Menschen zugänglich wird, den nationalsozialistischen Völkermord oder andere nationalsozialistische Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit leugnet, gröblich verharmlost, gutheißt oder zu rechtfertigen sucht. That translates as: Prosecuted according to sec. 3g will be who publishes denial, belittlement, approval or compurgation of the national socialist genocide via print-media, broadcast or in any other media or in a way that is accessible for a lot of people. In Austria e.g. Wolfenstein 3D was censored as the display of Nazi-Symbols already qualified as violation of the Verbotsgesetz. and § 3g states: [...] sofern die Tat nicht nach einer anderen Bestimmung strenger strafbar ist, mit Freiheitsstrafe von einem bis zu zehn Jahren, bei besonderer Gefährlichkeit des Täters oder der Betätigung bis zu 20 Jahren bestraft. That translates as: [...] unless the action is not penalized stricter by another clause, it is penalized with prison sentence of one to ten years, in case of particular dangerousness of the committer of of the actuation woth up to 20 years. Conclusion: If SimNazi is included into the main archive and distributed to Austrian mirrors this would put our fellow mirror sponsors and the project itself including our DPL, who is Austrian, in danger of imprisonment. Full text of the law is available at http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a9806511/materialien/verbotsgesetz.htm http://www.dagegenhalten.at/files/Verbotsgesetz.pdf http://www.antifa.co.at/antifa/nsverbot.PDF yours maxx p.s. please cc me as I'm not subscribed to debian-legal -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Debian GNU/Linux - The Universal Operation System signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283976: ITP: simnazi -- historical city simulation game, clone of Sim City
On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 03:05:17PM +0100, Martin Wuertele wrote: Prosecuted according to sec. 3g will be who publishes denial, belittlement, approval or compurgation of the national socialist genocide via print-media, broadcast or in any other media or in a way that is accessible for a lot of people. I don't see any reason why we should pander to the insanely fascist censorship policies of an obscure state. Conclusion: If SimNazi is included into the main archive and distributed to Austrian mirrors this would put our fellow mirror sponsors and the project itself including our DPL, who is Austrian, in danger of imprisonment. I am quite sure that I am in no danger of imprisonment by the Austrian Gestapo, any more than I am by the Libyan regime. The whole reason why we have armies is to protect us from these oppresive powers. Therefore there's no reason to think they are somehow a threat to the project. People unlucky enough to have been born under such a government will just have to look after themselves. They have many options available to them. All this is stunningly irrelevant though, given that Austria is a member of the EU these days, and this law is a blatant breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. So it's invalid and should get struck down. Any European citizen who is afflicted by this law can and should appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, who routinely overturn this sort of thing. Quoting from Karhuvaara and Iltalehti v. Finland (nothing special about it, just the most recent judgement on a claim against Article 10 with an English transcription): 37. According to the Court's well-established case-law, freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society and one of the basic conditions for its progress and each individual's self-fulfilment. Subject to paragraph 2 of Article 10, it is applicable not only to information or ideas that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb. Such are the demands of pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness, without which there is no democratic society. This freedom is subject to the exceptions set out in Article 10 § 2, which must, however, be construed strictly. The need for any restrictions must be established convincingly (see, for example, Lingens v. Austria, judgment of 8 July 1986, Series A no. 103, p. 26, § 41, and Nilsen and Johnsen v. Norway [GC], no. 23118/93, § 43, ECHR 1999-VIII). Which should give a fair indication of their opinion about this sort of thing. Using their search tool for appeals against Austria under Article 10 makes for amusing reading. Apparently they do this sort of thing a lot. Most of them are upheld. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283976: ITP: simnazi -- historical city simulation game, clone of Sim City
On Fri, 2004-03-12 at 17:05 +, Andrew Suffield wrote: The whole reason why we have armies is to protect us from these oppresive powers. Therefore there's no reason to think they are somehow a threat to the project. Yes. One of the reasons we have hundreds of developers in Debian is for just this kind of situation. If we ever need to execute military manoeuvres against a sovereign state, we have the manpower to do so. The question now becomes whether or not to make a preemptive strike against Austria. If so, do we commit ground troops, or just make surgical air strikes on Vienna and environs? All this is stunningly irrelevant though, given that Austria is a member of the EU these days, and this law is a blatant breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Yeah, whatever. Blah blah blah. Please tell us more about the composition of the atmosphere on Planet Libertaria. For those of us discussing issues on Earth: our experience as a project with silly national laws has been fairly pragmatic (cf. non-US mirrors). I don't think it's feasible for us to create separate non-at, non-cn, non-za, etc. package repositories. It'd just be ridiculous for users in one country to assemble a sources.list from lists of packages that may or may not be illegal in the 189 other sovereign nations. BUT... I wonder if there's a way to invert that process, and allow mirror operators to (automatically) exclude packages they feel put them in legal jeopardy. I'm not particularly familiar with our mirroring tools; can mirror operators define a blacklist of packages to ignore and not redistribute? ~ESP -- Evan Prodromou [EMAIL PROTECTED] signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Bug#283976: ITP: simnazi -- historical city simulation game, clone of Sim City
On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 01:45:33PM -0500, Evan Prodromou wrote: I don't think it's feasible for us to create separate non-at, non-cn, non-za, etc. package repositories. It'd just be ridiculous for users in one country to assemble a sources.list from lists of packages that may or may not be illegal in the 189 other sovereign nations. It would be feasible for us to put together a non-FOO meta repository. Each package in the repository would have a list of country code exclusions (where we believe the package is not ok) and inclusions (where we believe the package is ok). Individual operators would decide whether they want to support the minimal set (believed to be ok in their country) or the larger set (those not known to be problems). Cross linking the repositories so they mirror each other in a robust fashion would be a bit tricky (you need n-way replication which preserves deletes, and you'd want to declare one of the servers as the master server for each of the package+versions to make that work), but that's feasible. This isn't something we support. But, it's feasible. -- Raul
Re: Bug#283976: ITP: simnazi -- historical city simulation game, clone of Sim City
On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 01:45:33PM -0500, Evan Prodromou wrote: All this is stunningly irrelevant though, given that Austria is a member of the EU these days, and this law is a blatant breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Yeah, whatever. Blah blah blah. Please tell us more about the composition of the atmosphere on Planet Libertaria. We have these things called 'courts', where people actually have to defend their arguments, rather than just screaming 'nazi' and proceeding with the burning. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
