Quote:
Originally Posted by Robotech_Master
And that cuts both ways; the other day I saw a news story in which a suit by the owners of The Cosby Show against a British documentary on the downfall of Bill Cosby for using footage from it was thrown out of a US court because the documentary had never been made legally available in the US, so the suit would need to be filed in the UK. The Cosby Show people tried to argue that it could still be viewed here due to VPNs, but the court found that wasn't enough for an American court to have jurisdiction.
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Some judges do get it.
The act has two components: publishing, which happens at the site of thhe servers and downloading/purchasing, which happens at the site of the consumer.
In the Cosby case, both took place in the UK, so the court correctly ruled it had no jurisdiction. The same applies to french courts trying to control what Google shows its users outside France in the "right to be forgotten" scams. Legal systems have borders even if the internet does not.
In this case, Gutenberg is in the US and what they published is legal where they published it.
The downloads are intended for the US, where they are legal.
Nothing they have *done* is wrong, much less illegal.
The proper place, and legal system, for the Cosby suit is the UK.
And the proper place to sue Gutenberg is the US, where their servers and data reside.
Now, if Holtzbrink has an issue with the downloaders, they should do what the RIAA did and sue *them*.
Project Gutenberg is being attacked over illegal actions they neither encouraged nor control, as they have no way to control who has access to specific titles. Nor interest in investing $$$ in such a system to solve somebody else's "problem".
And the issue doesn't stop with the eighteen titles currently at issue. Gutenberg carries dozens, maybe hundreds of books that are PD in the US and commercial elsewhere. As long as German law makes Gutenberg responsible for the actions of german citizens they are at risk of being sued by whoever holds the rights to those books. Even english language books.
If the principle is broadly accepted, they would be targets for multiple reasons lawsuits from multiple regions.
Pulling the plug is a reasonable, if hardcore, response.
They have no vested interest in providing "illegal" access, after all.