It turns out that, according to the legal opinion, German law prohibits the collection of quotes, or quotes as such, if they are not used in a context. That would mean the German wikiquote project's legal status is shaky at best. (IANAL)

The legal study ordered by the German Wikimedia e.V. is mostly a summary of the current German law. While that has value in itself, those who have followed the relevant discussions will not find much new information in it. A more interesting study would be one of loopholes and ways to do an end run around copyright and trademark law: - How to cheat museums which try to steal public domain content by forbidding photographs. - How to get coat of arms images under a free or semi-free license. - How to phrase Wikiquote pages so that they fall under the fair use equivalent of German law. - How to use the fact that Wikimedia servers are in the United States to our advantage. In short, instead of asking "What does the law say?", we should ask "How can we do what we want to do?". If the answer is "We can't", then we should actively work to change the laws to our advantage. If we want to survive, we need to be creative in the way we deal with the law, especially in Germany, where, tolerated by the government, a substantial subset of lawyers are criminals who terrorize grandmothers and 15-year-old webmasters with illegal demands for money (google "Abmahnung"). If your perception is that, legally speaking, you are standing on a small island, then you will not even notice as the protections that the law grants you are eroded away by the ocean around you. We have to actively claim the ground that rightfully belongs to us, and not let lobbyists and corrupt governments get away with making information ever more proprietary.

Out of curiosity, Ray, what caused you to respond to a one year old email from me now? Are you experiencing some lag? :-)