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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

> A Court in Germany ordered that access to certain items in the Project Gutenberg collection are blocked from Germany... until the issue is resolved during appeal, [Project Gutenberg] will comply.

This is really misleading. It implies -- nay, outright states -- that Gutenberg is merely complying with the court order. But the court did not order the entire site to be blocked.

A more candid answer is found in their information page:[1]

Q: Why block all of Germany, rather than just those 18 books?

A: ...Because the German Court has overstepped its jurisdiction, and allowed the world's largest publishing group to bully Project Gutenberg for these 18 books, there is every reason to think that this will keep happening... Blocking Germany, in an effort to forestall further legal actions, seems the best way to protect the organization and retain focus on its mission.

[1] https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html

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PG decided they don't have time to deal with Germany's BS, so they implemented the simplest solution guaranteed to work.

More like retaliated to make a point.

For comparison, if they faced a U.S. publisher demand to block some books that were in violation, and in response they blocked all of the U.S., it would be misleading to suggest this was merely the "simplest solution".

You quoted them selectively to make your retaliation point. The full quote from the FAQ presents a very good argument, allowing access from a hostile legal jurisdiction could encourage thousands of cases and bankrupt the project:

>There are thousands of eBooks in the Project Gutenberg collection that could be subject to similar over-reaching and illigitimate actions.

>PGLAF is a small volunteer organization, with no income (it doesn't sell anything), other than donations. There is every reason to fear that this huge corporation, with the backing of the German Court, will continue to take legal action. In fact, at least one other similar complaint arrived in 2017 about different books in the Project Gutenberg collection, from another company in Germany.

If German courts maintains that making content available in Germany (ie, putting it on the Internet) gives them jurisdiction over your organisation, your choices are to be compliant with German law, or not to be available in Germany. PGLAF does not have the budget, nor the philosophical inclination to be compliant with German law, so that leaves one option. As you quoted in your GP, they have no reason to believe this will end with these 18 works, so the alternative really is compliance, not just blocking 18 works.

I'm sure PGLAF will welcome a German spin-off that makes works available in a manner compliant with German law, they just don't have the resources to be that place.

(Oh, and so what if they retaliated? Seems like a perfectly reasonable excuse for a bit of theatrics.)

That would only be the case if they thought the 18 books would be the end of the matter.

Quite obviously, it would not, so blocking all of Germany is the correct move to prevent any future cases under the same legal theories.

They don't want to be under German jurisdiction; the German court has said that serving users in Germany puts them under German jurisdiction; therefore they are no longer serving users in Germany. This seems like it should satisfy everyone concerned.

You're getting downvoted because it sounds like you're defending the plaintiffs, but you're essentially right. They could have minimized disruption to German users by removing the affected books and committing to remove other books upon request. They instead chose to respond in a very broad way that will draw a lot of attention.

Which, I want to be clear, is a good thing. PG is absolutely in the right here, and this response is well-calculated to raise awareness and put their attackers in the spotlight.

The simplest solution would have been to do nothing.

They still have to comply with the court ruling, i.e. at least block those 18 books in Germany, as they aren't The Pirate Bay. The website's move is smart because it avoids future complications coming from the Urheberrechtsgesetz, the German copyright law, and draws much-needed public attention to how easy it is for bully firms to abuse it.

The Q and A contradicts this.

>Copyright status in another country is not relevant to the legitimate ability of Project Gutenberg -- or anyone/anything in the US -- to make any use of these books.

According to the ruling, the CEO wouldn't be liable personally unless the violation is willful. Which, having been adjudicated in German court, it now would be. If the CEO becomes personally liable then found in contempt, he would have to avoid travel to Germany. That's a lot to ask of a volunteer.

How come they have to obey the court in Germany?

Copyright laws are to be respected whatever the country. This is a border case, so to see if the principle is sound, let's imagine something. Let's say a country, for whatever reason, decides that its copyright protections are of 1 year only. After that, this country decides that all books, movies, games are freely available from its territory through the internet because their copyrights are expired. Does anyone believes that all the other countries will say : "no problem, it's their law and the site is from their territory, so everything's allright" ? So, laws from any country have to be respected, especially with a global system like the internet. It is often annoying, sometimes disconcerting, but no country would allow their society to be governed by foreign laws. And I really appreciate even more the Project Gutenberg for that, because they care about laws everywhere and obey them according to the territory (the fact that they went for the easy way by blocking the entire country is really not important: it is just a matter of resources, so we have to donate more if this is what bothers us).

Is the country with the one-year copyrights a Berne Convention signatory?

If so, then it is in violation of the treaty, which sets a minimum term for copyrights. The WIPO may adjudicate and other signatories may take action.

If not, then what you have is a national sovereignty issue. Other countries can restrict trade with the one with different laws, but they can't directly stop it from refusing to be similar to them (without a military invasion!).

This is currently the situation with things like online gambling. It's legal in some parts of the world, and in others the citizens accessing the sites may be prosecuted, but the sites themselves are usually beyond the reach of the disapproving countries - often the USA.

I should note that it is totally possible to have two countries with CONTRADICTORY laws that cannot be simultaneously satisfied. How would you deal with that situation, if all must be respected?

You're giving an ethical reason, but I'm more interested in the actual consequences of a US entity ignoring a German court ruling. I'm not sure what teeth this court actually has with regard to American citizens.

No one really wants to antagonize the court system of another country for ever, so this gives the German courts some teeth. In this case Project Gutenberg is saying they are complying because they want an appeal and that the courts would look unfavourably on them if they just ignored the original order.

That would be risky for the people running Project Gutenberg, since Germany and the US have extradition treaties.

Unlikely to be extradited for an extra-territorial claim. But the members of the executive and the board might not want to strike Germany from their list of travel destinations forever.

It says "ordered that access to certain items..." I don't see anything misleading, or any implication that the court ordered the whole site blocked. I think it is obvious that only a few items were ordered to be blocked but they decided to block the whole site

I thought it was pretty clear. They specifically say "certain items" were to be blocked, not the entire website.

This is answered in the FAQ at the bottom of the article. Essentially because this sets a precedent that Germany believes it can sue over anything in the german language and other items in the library might potentially cause the same kind of lawsuit it's better to just block everything instead.

> Germany believes it can sue over anything in the german language

You did not read the ruling (carefully). The language of the books was not discussed at all. It was discussed whether the offer (to download books) is directed to people in Germany.

Project Gutenberg said "NO", because they use a .org domain. (Obviously trying to claim that Germans only visit .de domains and neglecting the fact that .org is really trying to stress international coverage)

The court ruled "YES" because

- Project Gutenberg explicitly mentions to be available worldwide (before the geo blocking resulting from this very case)

- Project Gutenberg has some of its Web site translated into German. (In court they argued they did that to address US users, because German is the 3rd biggest foreign language in the US. The court did not accept that argument.)

Furthermore it was counted against them that project Gutenberg advises on its web site that users must check local copyright laws before downloading, because downloading might be illegal according to local laws.

Taking these points into account I must say the court ruling was logical from a legal viewpoint. Project Gutenberg had only lame excuses and in fact denied their own mission in court.

The real issue is that incompatible country laws don't fit at all with Internet (unless you propose a Chinese big (fire)wall). But I don't see any improvements any time soon, a certain president just declared last week that trade wars are the way to go.

Why doesn't Austria have jurisdiction for German content, do they not speak German in Austria? Do UK courts have jurisdiction over companies which produce content in English? It's absurd to think that an element to establishing jurisdiction is the language content is produced in.

They said they have jurisdiction because the contents is directed (also) to users in Germany. They said nothing about exclusive jurisdiction or exclusively directed to Germany. They also ruled that access to the average user in Germany must not be easy (acknowledging that the user decided to download can circumvent it.) There was not a word about making the contents available to users in any other country.

In the context of existing copyright laws the ruling is understandable. It's just plain nonsense to have contradicting copyright laws in the age of a global internet. And if you say that copyright should only be enforced according to the country of the distributor then you just move all contents to a country that does not enforce at all. But isn't it just the US that complains a lot about (their) IP not enforced in China or Vietnam?

As you surmise, I have not read the ruling. I was basing my understanding from the following in the article:

> Q: Why didn't Project Gutenberg block access until the Court made its judgement?

> A: PGLAF's legal advisors disagree that any foreign Court or entity has jurisdiction over its actions regarding copyright. The Court in Germany has promoted a theory that it has jurisdiction, mainly because the www.gutenberg.org site has some content in the German language. ...

> Q: So the court thinks that the presence of content in German means that courts in Germany have jurisdiction, regardless of the fact that PGLAF is entirely in the US?

> A: Yes, that was the original basis of the claim for jurisdiction, which the Court accepted in their judgement. Since then, there some more recent decisions in the European Court of Justice, and other German courts, that support this theory based on a Web site being accessible from a country. I.e., if a Web site is accessible from Germany, there are some cases where German courts claimed jurisdiction over that site, even though it was operated, and based, outside of Germany. These cases involve companies that actually operate (for-profit) in Europe, and the cases were between two European countries (i.e. part of the EU). They are not consistent with prior laws and cases, even in Europe, and also not consistent with provisions of the Berne Convention and other international law.

Prededents.

Further lawsuits against PG for any of the other German texts could bankrupt the organization.

I disagree - it's not at all clear. Most people reading the statement would assume that the book they were trying to access was among the 'certain items' blocked by the court.

I'm currently in Germany. The notice appears when trying to access any part of the catalog, even the search. Thus, I don't think this is an issue.

It also appears for the URL they give in the FAQ for donations :-(

As the block page states, the court order states that certain items must be blocked - it does not specify the means by which it must be accomplished. Blocking German IPs is the simplest way to achieve that.

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