> for playing devils advocate I can see the courts point: International websites have to respect local laws
I think this is an untenable position as it would mean that any website, published from any country, hosted on servers in any country, would have to abide by the laws of the world’s 193 countries.
Project Gutenberg’s argument is that they are only a US concern — everyone involved officially is in the US, and the site is hosted in the US.
This is distinct from, say, a company explicitly providing a service to customers in a particular country (cf GDPR).
And, to counter your point with an extreme example, it would mean that no-one is ever able to criticise the Thai monarch on any website in the world lest they be jailed under Thailand’s lèse majesté laws.
It’s one thing to say that an in-country website respect that country’s laws, it’s another entirely to say that any website hosted anywhere in the world must respect that country’s laws.
I think this is an untenable position as it would mean that any website, published from any country, hosted on servers in any country, would have to abide by the laws of the world’s 193 countries.
Project Gutenberg’s argument is that they are only a US concern — everyone involved officially is in the US, and the site is hosted in the US.
This is distinct from, say, a company explicitly providing a service to customers in a particular country (cf GDPR).
And, to counter your point with an extreme example, it would mean that no-one is ever able to criticise the Thai monarch on any website in the world lest they be jailed under Thailand’s lèse majesté laws.
It’s one thing to say that an in-country website respect that country’s laws, it’s another entirely to say that any website hosted anywhere in the world must respect that country’s laws.