[mannerheim]

Germany forced Project Gutenberg to block them for a time as well.

This should not be the responsibility of the website owner to comply with the laws of a country they don't have a presence in, presumably under threat of either extradition or arrest if they one day happen to enter the borders of the country.

If the website doesn't comply with the laws of the country, that country should block it, and that should be the extent to the action they can reasonably take. Unless you think Belarus should be able to arrest somebody passing through their airspace because, say, some other individual made a comment critical of Lukashenko on their blog?

[zaarn]

So you also think that website owners should not be allowed to block content if they think a particular country is worth their business? Because that is what is actually happening, not made up fantasies about "forcing them". Either you block or they block, and it's not a crime for one side to do it first (what should I bet that if Germany blocked Telegram it would be a similar outrage in the comment section???)

[mannerheim]

No, I think countries should not be allowed to bully people who have no presence in their country under threat of extradition or arrest if they ever happen to step foot in their country.

Project Gutenberg ended up complying with German copyright law even though they have zero presence in Germany precisely because they were bullied in this fashion.

[zaarn]

They complied to german copyright law in germany. They didn't block anything in outside countries so I wouldn't call that bullying. The other option is being blocked in or blocking germany.

[mannerheim]

PG initially blocked Germany in order to appease the court (defying a court order may have affected their case). They repeatedly asserted, however, that the German courts did not have jurisdiction over them since they had zero presence in Germany, and only fought the case because of the various punishments the German government could have meted out otherwise. Germany blocking PG was not something the court had presented as in the cards, and obviously PG would have found that acceptable since they blocked Germany themselves.

The onus should have entirely been on Germany to block PG if they didn't comply with German laws, not on PG to block Germany so that users in Germany couldn't violate German law.