Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
If I have a dispute with my local car dealer, I can't sue them in a US court. The court would have no jurisdiction over the British car dealer.
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Individuals have been successfully sued for libel in the US by foreign nationals for comments published elsewhere. The cases I remember were from the UK, in fact.
Try looking at it like the owner of a small digital site: the EU say they will come after you over something you have no way to control. Do you blow them off and hope they don't really mean it or do you act as if they mean exactly what they say? They dropped the requirement completely, after all. They didn't merely lower it to a few thousand, they abolished it entirely; that means they intend to go after the smallest of the small.
I suppose some folks won't mind gambling their livelihood on the charity of the EU but many don't seem so inclined.
In the publishing environment, where most of the big vested interests in print are European, it makes perfect sense that they would use their influence to hamper ebook sales in as many ways as possible, wherever possible, so I would not be inclined to assume they don't mean it.
These are rules that Hachette and Bertlesmann and FNAC and Thalia will all approve off so this was no accident.
(Shrug)
To each their own.
I just think that the folks who are worried have ample reason to be worried.
Like these folks:
http://www.julietemckenna.com/?p=1502