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Dear all,

apologies in case you are already aware of the following.  For those who are not: Here is a case of detriment to scholarly work due a geoblocking measure against Germany instigated by a database hosted by a US university.

Several months ago, the US non-profit organisation Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/, offering free of charge a literature database of 56,000 mainly English-language e-books for online reading and download, lost a lawsuit in which S. Fischer Verlag, seated in Frankfurt a. M., had been the plaintiff regarding German Urheberrecht on 18 works by Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin.

At first sight, this seems to be a legal and moral David and Goliath strife between incongruent opponents, one commercial, one non-commercial. Yet the matter is actually different. The publishing house had initially tried repeatedly to reach an out-of-court agreement, but Project Gutenberg had refuted these efforts as its CEO Dr. Gregory Newby (E-Mail [log in to unmask]g) kept arguing that the said works are public domain in the US. 

When S. Fischer finally called upon Landgericht Frankfurt/M., the court ruled Project Gutenberg needed to either take the 18 e-books from its website or block German online access to these items, cf. https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/gutenberg-lawsuit-judgement-DE.pdf. 

However, Project Gutenberg did neither of the two; instead, Dr. Newby decided on a wholesale open-end geoblocking against all German IP addresses as from 27 February 2018, cf. https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html, https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Gutenberg-org-Blockade-deutscher-Nutzer-ist-nun-komplett-3997349.html.

In effect, this reaction is a bi-national punishing measure as Project Gutenberg knowingly and unfairly hits all German users while pretending to aim solely at S. Fischer. What with Project Gutenberg's reaction guaranteed to create media outrage against S. Fischer,  the geoblocking measure may even have been calculated to achieve the result of deviating users from recognising the actual problem.

In this sense, Project Gutenberg's action was clever if nothing else, since in fact many blog posts on the German IT-specialist website Heise www.heise-online.de have since accused S. Fischer of capitalist greed respectively the German nation-state of presumed "old-fashioned" Urheberrecht resp. generally "out-dated" laws and IT procedures believed detrimental to users.

Yet the matter is nowhere near as simple as that, because the judicial concepts of European continental Urheberrecht and US copyright differ widely from each other, cf. http://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/medien-und-sport/urheberrecht/169971/urheberrecht-und-copyright

The real effect of Project Gutenberg's action is the contrary of any sensible reaction to the court's ruling, i.e. harm has been done to the scholarly work of German-based users. I for one could not access a British novel from 1905 on the Project Gutenberg database while I urgently needed to do so for my Warwick PhD work. Even just one such case is already one too many.

Project Gutenberg's attitude raises the question of why US organisations try to assume the right to rule the global digital world at their convenience. Moreover, The actual legal issue of creative and intellectual property is a global problem with the US sitting in a glass house. The US keep worsening the global legal situation for the exclusive benefit of US companies' interests. Repeated past US laws have already stretched US copyright for creative and intellectual property in many fields. Ongoing similar US judicial intentions aim at stretching it once again even beyond a 100-year(!) timespan, cf. https://extrajournal.net/2017/01/18/erwzingt-mickey-mouse-2018-eine-us-copyright-aenderung/

Best regards,

Gerhild Krebs M.A., [log in to unmask]