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Comment by curiousfab | Hacker News Reader

PG did exactly the right thing here.

By only blocking these 18 books, nobody would have taken much notice of this. By blocking all German users from the site, they will get a lot of media attention, and S. Fischer Verlag will get a lot of bad press. Whether or not they will move from their position is questionable, but it will hurt them.

Just sent a small donation to PG.

Making an effort not to buy books from that publishing house ever again, and telling all my friends about it.

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> Making an effort not to buy books from that publishing house ever again, and telling all my friends about it.

Good luck with that. S. Fischer is owned by Holtzbrinck. They own Macmillan, Springer Nature and a bunch of other publishing houses. Here's a list of their subsidiaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holtzbrinck_Publishing_Group#S...

Is it so uncommon for big companies to evaluate the performance of various divisions independently? If Holtzbrinck recognizes that S. Fischer's activities have caused that subsidiary to start losing money, they will probably modify their opinion. Why would they want to subsidize a losing bet using the profits from other divisions? The fact that two companies are owned by the same holding group does not really mean they are the "same" company, any more than two companies which are majority owned by the same private investors are the same company.

I would guess most of us outside Germany have no real contact with S. Fischer, but considerable dealings with Holtzbrinck's other subsidiaries.

S. Fischer isn't just a independent subsidiary. The company is run by Monika Schoeller (born Monika von Holtzbrinck). She and her brother own large parts of Holtzbrinck and she's listed as a partner and member of the supervisory board on Holtzbrinck's website. (Her brother, Stefan von Holtzbrinck, is the CEO.)

> Why would they want to subsidize a losing bet using the profits from other divisions?

Because owning S. Fischer, Rowohlt and Droemer Knaur means owning a large chunk of the german book market.

> Good luck with that.

Well, depending on the books, it may be easy to download the books online without buying them...

If enough people stop buying from just Macmillan alone, that would have an impact.

Unfortunately, a significant portion of their business is in public education, where that isn't seen as an option.

Don't buy but pirate and share. Let's not block information only payment.

So the authors should work for free? That’s theft.

It's not theft. If you took away the bike of the author, that's theft.

The author will work for free if the boycott proceeds. This way his work can at least be seen.

The author probably got paid an amount for writing the book and then hands all rights over to the publisher. The publisher then prints it forever and takes the income from that. This is a guess based on working with other publishers though. Individual companies may differ.

No matter how much propaganda has told you otherwise, copyright violation is not theft.

Theft involves a physical loss by the victim. After a theft, the victim no longer has the stolen property. Would you consider it theft if someone looked at your car, and built an exact copy 1,000 miles away? Of course not! You still have your car.

That makes it easier to make an impact. Now that they own a considerable portion of the market, next time you're gonna buy some Macmillan book, just don't buy it, and instead find pdf through genlib or pirate bay.

But did they do the right thing by participating in a court that has no jurisdiction? Why would they participate in that? Doesn't participating extend legitimacy to the claims, and make one subject the outcome (including paying the legal fees when losing)?

No more so than if they didn't participate. It's generally suggested that if someone sues you in a jurisdiction that you care about, you show up to defend yourself. Otherwise you'll simply have summary judgement entered against you. Now, in this case since the plaintiffs won, it probably wouldn't have been any worse—and likely cheaper due to lower legal costs—but they couldn't know that going in.

They are appealing the decision.

> But did they do the right thing by participating in a court that has no jurisdiction?

Good question - I was wondering myself. What's stopping them from simply ignoring the ruling and walking away? It's certainly not Project Gutenberg's obligation to carry out a block ordered by a country they don't do any business in. And if anyone thinks it is, does that still apply if the court isn't a german one, but instead one from...let's say...the faroer islands? Nobody would care and I don't see why Project Gutenberg should in this case.

Ignoring the order could result in personal liability of people involved in the project (as this is now a willful violation). Those people can then strike off Germany (and likely the EU and other countries) from the list of places to ever visit.

They can seize all assets within their reach (e.g. donations from Germans) but this would be a larger problem if the site would be a for-profit company with European customers. So the risk for the site to have the ruling actually enforced is lower than usual.

They own Apress, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Nature

For a second I thought you were talking about Paul Graham

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