Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me why project Gutenberg has decided to block the COMPLETE site for German IPs instead of just blocking the books in question?

Is this just a dick move to enrage people and get attention?

And they could have blocked just the pages with the books in question directly after receiving the copyright violation notification...

View on HN

this is discussed here in the comments extensively. The best answer is that they block Germany because they expect if they complied by only blocking certain books they would have to deal with many more requests in the future. They also decided to take this chance to make a statement to encourage a public debate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com