Quote:
Originally Posted by Robotech_Master
No, the plaintiff is demanding that Gutenberg stop its illegal behavior: making still-copyrighted books available in Germany, where it doesn't hold the copyright to them.
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But they're not. Gutenberg isn't making books available in Germany. They don't have a German presence at all. They don't have any direct connections to Germany. They're making them available in the US.
If a German user downloads from a US site, they're making a series of connections through various ISPs before finally obtaining the book in the US, and then importing it into Germany over another series of connections. It's like driving from Berlin to Minsk to buy a book and then driving home, but much faster. You don't sanction the Minsk bookseller, you stop it at the border or sanction the individual bringing materials back into the country. And you don't argue that the Minsk bookseller is doing business in Germany because they're connected to Berlin by a series of roads that makes it easy for Germans to buy things there.
The proper German response should be either a) Require German ISPs not to connect to sites that infringe on German copyrights; or b) Sanction the users who are importing material from the US that is still under German copyright.
Or something else targeted at the actual infringers, rather than trying to push the problem off to someone operating legally in another jurisdiction.
It's different from something like Amazon, where Amazon actually is operating in Germany.