[SkeuomorphicBee]

> And while I understand, that Project Gutenberg has limited resources and may have no desire to do the extra work of blocking works on a case by case basis, it would not have been difficult. Instead, they have chosen to collectively punish all people from Germany, which resulted us to be seven years without access, at least as long we did not utilize a VPN.

They explain their rationale for this and it is a very sound one, it is not about the difficulty to block, it is about opening themselves to lawsuits. Here is the relevant quotes:

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

> [...] 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.

I agree with their assessment, once the German court decided that all international treaties and public domain basically don't exist, and decided that German courts have jurisdiction over the US, it means that ALL works on the project are equally "illegal" (or at least many, they can't know which ones), and therefore nothing on the whole site is safe to be accessible in Germany. Their only option was to block the whole site or open themselves to uncountable other lawsuits (and limitless amount of punitive damages).

As to how they reopened the site for Germany now, I can only speculate, but I imagine that in the settlement they somehow got some kind of assurance from the big publishers that they won't sue and seek punitive damages for other works. With that the project decided that the risk of lawsuit is now low enough to allow for opening for Germany.

[pgeorgi]

> ALL works on the project are equally "illegal" (or at least many, they can't know which ones)

Those whose authors aren't dead for 70 years (because we don't have the "pre-1978" loophole the US has). Probably (but here things get vague) even limited to stuff originating from German authors, even if it was also published in the US pre-1978.

> limitless amount of punitive damages

Punitive damages? In Germany?

> I imagine that in the settlement they somehow got some kind of assurance from the big publishers that they won't sue and seek punitive damages for other works.

Project Gutenberg tried to make a stand and then found out that practically nobody bothered to notice their protest. Now they stop making an ass of themselves. Good on them.

[germanier]

Which international treaties were ignored by German courts in these cases?

[ma2rten]

The OP writes: "International treaties explicitly and unambiguously support PGLAF's legal guidance as described above: that the copyright status in one country is not impacted or enforceable or otherwise relevant in other countries. Plaintiff managed to find a German Court, and some precedents from Germany (and, after the lawsuit was filed, from the EU), which were willing to flaunt international treaties by developing a theory that PGLAF is under jurisdiction of the German Court system."

[germanier]

That's the biased interpretation of the PGLAF. Framing the whole thing as "unambiguous", "managed to find a German Court" and "some precedents" is disingenuous. There is a reason they don't refer to any precedent supporting their position: there is none. How can you say with a straight face that the issue is unambiguous when in fact there is precedence pointing in the other direction?

Note that the courts didn't ignore those treaties and or somehow ruled they weren't enforceable. They just have a different interpretation of the legal contents of those treaties than the PGLAF does. Law is often not black or white and anyone who claims there is just one true position doesn't tell you the whole truth. The issue is actually pretty interesting legally and there is a lot more subtlety to it than the claim that courts are somehow bending the law.