[Glyn Moody, TechDirt, Link] Project Gutenberg, which currently offers 56,000 free ebooks, is one of the treasures of the Internet, but it is not as well known as it should be. Started in 1991 by Michael S. Hart, who sadly died in 2011, Project Gutenberg is dedicated to making public domain texts widely available. Over the last 25 years, volunteers have painstakingly entered the text of books that are out of copyright, and released them in a variety of formats. The site is based in the US, and applies US law to determine whether a book has entered the public domain. Since copyright law is fragmented and inconsistent around the world, this can naturally lead to the situation that a book in the public domain in the US is still in copyright elsewhere. To deal with this, the site has the following “terms of use”:
Our eBooks may be freely used in the United States because most are not protected by U.S. copyright law, usually because their copyrights have expired. They may not be free of copyright in other countries. Readers outside of the United States must check the copyright terms of their countries before downloading or redistributing our eBooks. We also have a number of copyrighted titles, for which the copyright holder has given permission for unlimited non-commercial worldwide use.
That approach seemed to be working, at least until this happened to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (PGLAF):
On December 30, 2015, PGLAF received notification that a lawsuit had been filed in Germany against it, and its CEO. The lawsuit was concerned with 18 eBooks, by three authors, which are part of the Project Gutenberg collection.
The lawsuit was filed in the Frankfurt am Main Regional Court, in Germany.
The Plaintiff is S. Fischer Verlag, GmbH. Hedderichstrasse 114, 60956 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. They are represented by the law firm, Waldorf Frommer of Munich.
The essence of the lawsuit is that the Plaintiff wants the 18 eBooks to no longer be accessible, at least from Germany. It also seeks punitive damages and fines.
Based on legal advice from its US attorneys, PGLAF declined to remove or block the items. The lawsuit proceeded, with a series of document filings by both sides, and hearings before the judges (all of which occurred in German, in the German court). PGLAF hired a German law firm, Wilde Beuger Solmecke, in Köln, to represent it in Germany.
On February 9 2018, the Court issued a judgement granting essentially all of the Plaintiff’s demands.
Court’s original decision (in German). [pdf]
Decision translated into English. [pdf]
PGLAF complied with the Court’s order on February 28, 2018 by blocking all access to www.gutenberg.org and sub-pages to all of Germany.
