PlasticPanzers.com Forum

Good morning/day/evening gents,

besides the obvious changes going from PA to PP, there's also another little issue: The site is now hosted by a German company on German servers and owned by a German citizen living in Germany. Which means that the site and everyone using it is subject to German law. Surprise!

You may know that there is a ban on certain naughty symbols as used by a certain German government roughly 80 years ago. There's a whole catalogue, but of course the most relevant are the Swastika and the Sig rune, as used by the SS and Hitlerjugend. Displaying these for the sake of historical documentation is allowed (i.e. historical or museum photos), but on scale models it is not. These legally count as toys. Therefore please cover any Swastika or SS runes on model photos before posting them. I know this is completely ridiculous, but regrettably, it's the law.

In theory the Finnish Hakaristi is not covered by this. Regrettably I wouldn't count on German law enforcement to know the difference.

The second issue I need to mention is the rather strict German copyright law. There's no such thing as fair use, so it's not advisable to post copyrighted photos, book pages etc unless it's part of a review.

All of the above only counts for things posted directly on this site. Linking to other sites where such things are legal is perfectly fine, thankfully.

We're still a tiny raft in the vast uncharted ocean that is the internet, so it's not like I'd be immediately sent off to Gulag for any minor infraction appearing on this site. Still, I think it's better if you know what's the deal.

Thanks for looking. Now have fun using PP!

Philipp

OK, so it is OK to use images posted from Imgur?

That shouldn't be a problem.

I guess history casts a long shadow, lest we forget.

Thanks Philipp

Steve H

Linking to images with doubtful content is fine, embedding them on the forum isn't. Thankfully this isn't much of an issue for us armour modellers.

If I look at the last election here, far too many seem to have forgotten already...

Philipp

So in other words, if we want the german admin/site owner to get in serious trouble, all we have to do is post a picture of our latest 1/35 german officer with armband and all??

Oh, the possiblities


j/k of course - in case you got worried

Go on, try me

Philipp Gross wrote: ↑05 Oct 2017, 21:50 so it's not like I'd be immediately sent off to Gulag for any minor infraction appearing on this site.
Philipp

Well in this case I think we would all send you some oranges to keep you fit

Considering I'm only posting modern armor material, I guess I won't be a jail bait for you.

Luckily I do not do many German WWII anything. At least not in that time period or markings. I will ask about the Totenkopf as when I was in Germany in 82-86, that was another no no for public display (historical artifact or model kits). Just wanted to bring it up and check. The toy store owner was such a great guy. By law he had to paint over the box art, instructions and decals to be able to put them on display. He would wait until I made my Saturday payday visit to destroy the kits because of the amount of money I spent there. Hey, I was single, away from home and the mark to dollar rate was 5.35 to 1! I was in Big boy model collector heaven!

Olivier -
a few things from modern day Ukraine might be questionable...

Mark -
Sounds like you had a good time back then Regrettably these days the censorship is carried out by customs officials or the importer, so the hobby shops no longer have a say in the matter.

The Totenkopf is a borderline case...Technically it's also forbidden, but I guess it's not as well known as the rest, so it's less likely to cause a disturbance. Also there are dozens of other cases where similar symbols were used by other military units, long before the SS.

Oh well....as I said, we're a tiny little website and most of this isn't nearly as critical as it might sound.

Philipp

I had a blast. Same when I was in Korea and Academy released new kits. I picked those up for pennies on the dollar as well. I figured times had changed. I just thought the Bad Kissingen Shop owner was so nice for waiting on me to place out his armor kits!