I quite understand that Alex is worried by the thought of being savaged by some fearsome litiginous beast. But I am staggered at the effort he's willing to put up. According to my
Patricia Clark library database, there are over 2400 authors in the library. No doubt this includes several duplications due to variations in spelling, but then it does not generally include translators, illustrators, contributors to antologies and whatnot. That's an awful lot of obituaries to wade through to find out who joined the choir invisible before 1943.
(IANAL and all that)
I assume Alex is in a vulnerable position because he is a Swiss legal person, so it can be claimed (pretty dubiously, IMHO), that downloading a book from mobileread's Canadian server constitutes some kind of contract between Alex and the downloader, and is to be treated under Swiss law.
Splitting off the library from the site, and creating a new site whose owner is a legal person from Canada (or Autralia, NZ, or another life+50 country) should make such a legal challenge invalid.
I presume a legal person can also be some kind of registered organization, and not necessarily an actual person. (For example, it seems reasonable to assume I could be the legal owner of a Canadian firm that sells non-copyrighted material in Canada, even though I am neither a Canadian citizen or resident). Thus Alex may be able to retain control over the library through some kind of Canadian not-for-profit organization, though undoubtedly the safest and surest route would be to give it to some trustworthy denizen of northern North America.
Not a straightforward solution, nor necessarily a viable one, but – unless it has already been thought of and discarded – perhaps worth looking into when taking a break from going through all those obituaries?