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There's this tendency people have of treating stuff on the Internet as if it happens in some far-away nebulous Internet-land, above the paltry concerns of real-world law enforcement. But as this decision shows, that's not really the case.
It wasn't necessary for Project Gutenberg to have servers or advertising in Germany. It's making books available in Germany, just as surely as if it sat just outside the German borders and flung paper copies over the wall by catapult. It's nothing new for file downloads to be treated as if they happened locally to where the downloading computer is; that's why Amazon can't sell particular ebooks in Germany unless they have licensed the right to sell those books there, even if they're selling them strictly from servers in the USA (and even if they could sell paper editions of those same books to German customers from warehouses in the USA).
Why should the German publisher have to go to the expense of traveling all the way to America to litigate against this? The harm to that publisher's German sales is happening in Germany.
It might be different if this were a matter having to do with an American website offering materials that went against a foreign country's religious or moral codes, because America has the freedom of speech that many repressive regimes do not. (And, indeed, most repressive regimes that might be inclined to make that kind of trouble have instead implemented their own national "Great Firewalls," so they don't have to rely on something as potentially chancy as enforcement overseas of a local court opinion.)
But this is a matter pertaining to copyright, as codified by international treaties to which both Germany and the USA are signatories. This isn't a freedom-of-speech matter, it's a copyright violation matter.
Given that commercial ebook stores had to start minding where they were selling starting in 2009, I'm just surprised it took so long for Project Gutenberg to come to a foreign rights-holder's attention. They had to realize it was going to happen sooner or later. They're going to have to start paying more attention to foreign publishers' requests to block availability of given books in their countries, and perhaps figure out some way of doing that cheaply and easily so such requests won't cost them as much in the future. Because this is surely going to happen more and more often as overseas ebook markets start to catch up with the USA's.
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