Quote:
Originally Posted by Gardenman
I was wondering the same thing. Why don't they just do nothing.
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Well, in an email from Dr. David Newby, administrator of PG, to David and myself at TeleRead, he noted that the German court could use the US District Court to force PG to abide by its ruling. Presumably, it was simplest to avoid trouble and expense by going ahead and complying pending the appeal rather than making that necessary.
Incidentally, if these works are indeed still under copyright in Germany,
I think the German publisher was within its rights to ask that Project Gutenberg not make these works available there. Posting works to the entire Internet and just asking people not to download them if they're still in copyright where they are might have worked back when Gutenberg was founded, when the Internet was smaller, non-commercial, and largely US-only. But now that the Internet is a global, commercial network, it's a different story. If commercial ebook stores can restrict ebooks' availability in places where they don't have the rights, public-domain ebook sites are going to have to figure out a way to do so, too.