> Don't you consider a website in German, accessible from Germany, which looks totally legal for most Germans as some kind of legal presence in Germany?
No.
The site is created in some set of locations, and is hosted on servers in some set of locations. If none of those locations is in Germany, Germany has no personal jurisdiction.
(At least under US law, which is what counts when it comes to enforcing judgement against someone in the US.)
> 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.
No. If you read the court order, they are arguing, that gutenberg.org is targeted at Germans. There are a few reason:
1. there's a link on the front page to view the site in German
3. Gutenberg was after all German and .org isn't .us
4. gutenberg.org was mentioned quite a lot in the German media
Also, let's not forget, that gutenberg.org was contacted about this in advance, multiple times.
So yeah: If you do a website and target a different country, ignore emails about legal issues from citizens of that country for months, you should start to think about respecting the laws of that country.
> So the court thinks that the presence of content in German means that courts in Germany have jurisdiction, regardless of the fact that PGLAF is entirely in the US?
I suspect that if the Brits started claiming jurisdiction — well, _everywhere_ - on this basis, then that would raise eyebrows
> That changes when the "wholly USA" website is being used by German citizens, who are under jurisdiction.
Then Germans will have to prosecute those going to the website and using it or remove it from German DNS servers. Germany has no right to try and limit the rights of US citizens by extension of limiting those of Germans.
> I's not about "disparaging things about the <country>", it's about running a website or service and not reacting to the fact that actual nazis are using the service. (You know with the eugenics and everything!)
As much as I hate the Nazis, Nazi sentiment is not illegal in the USA as long as they stay within the law. The German government has no right to push their ideology and laws here. Again block Germans from the site or sue to have Parler block German user IP addresses (good luck with that, it won't last 5 minutes before the judge laughs and says "next case")
> That changes when the "wholly USA" website is being used by German citizens, who are under jurisdiction.
Then block the website in your country. If I have no physical, legal, or economic presence in your country, I shouldn't expect to have to follow your laws. Do I need to start enforcing Thai lèse majesté laws too, now?
> International websites have to respect local laws.
No way.
If I, a US citizen, publish a website hosted in the US that is critical of the Turkish president, should a Turkish court be able to compel me to take it down or block access from Turkey?
What if I'm Israeli and I publish open source software, source and binary hosted in Israel, that is against US hacking laws. Should a US court be able to order an Israeli to stop doing something that is legal in Israel?
(Both of these are hypothetical, I don't know if there are such laws.)
If I have no business in a country (or pseudo country like EU) they should have no jurisdiction over me. I shouldn't have to comply with every crazy authoritarian, free speech suppressing, restricted use country in the world.
If countries want to prosecute their own citizens for visiting my site, consuming my content, or using my software, that is their business.
Now if I do business in that country... that is different, then they might have some legal jurisdiction over me.
> DO it might be because they have EU possibly even German Data centers but simply because a Citizen of Germany visits a web site and signs up for a online service does not automatically make german laws apply to that business.
Are you saying this because you are extrapolating from American law regarding whether a company has a 'nexus' within a given state, or perhaps thinking about taxation?
In those specific cases, what you are saying is true, but in general national-level governments do not care that foreign companies are not actually headquartered within their borders. They demand (arrogantly one might say) that all companies doing business with their citizens follow X,Y,Z rules or else they'll try to sanction the company.
Granted if a company is truly foreign then any sanction would be pretty limited in scope.
However, easy sanction is to stop credit card processors and banking agencies from dealing with a foreign company thus stopping your citizens from easily giving them money.
> There is no jurisdiction that the legal patch doesn't apply to.
I don’t think it applies to the US. The first amendment takes precedence over German laws. They can block access, but they can’t sue if there is no entity in Germany.
> If they're an European company operating and hosting in Europe, the US government has no jurisdiction over them.
No it is not true. Region of operation is completely irrelevant. US could arrest Kim Dotcom. Or non European companies have to comply with GDPR for European customers.
> Why should MS in the US somehow respond to a request from police department in Cuxhafen in Germany?
If a non-US company does business in the US, most people would expect the business to also answer to US law enforcement. You can't just operate in a business and not follow the law of that country. Same applies the other way around, you do business as a US company in Germany, you better follow German law. Hence companies tend to have HQ in one country, and then subsidiaries in other countries, who know how the local market and laws work.
> If so, does it mean that, as a hypothetical website owner, I need to understand and be compliant with every law in every possible country, or risk fines / imprisonment?
This has literally always been the case. Some nations have legal statutes that they will not enforce a foreign judgement against their own citizens (such as the US shield against UK libel judgements) but you're on your own if you leave your country of residence. Plenty of US newspapers still block access to the UK of stories they feel legal risk from for example, because their owners would like to go on holidays sometimes.
Extra territorial enforcement is a lot more muddy than people think, but it's never, ever been the case that you're fine if you're incorporated in a different territory. If they can demonstrate that there's a body of people in their country accessing the site, then generally you are liable. It's just if the legal system considers that to be too much of a pain to worry about.
Those should only apply to users accessing from those nations
It is a complex issue for a global company for sure, but I do not want the internet to be censored down to the lowest common denominator of Government regulations.
A Person in nation X should not have to be censored under the laws of nation Y
The problem is that it sent copyrighted files to Germany (outside the U.S.). The court order only demands to stop this.
I doubt that the order is enforcible on U.S. soil. But if individuals associated with an uncomplying organization set foot in or have assets in a territory where the order could be enforced, they risk real consequences.
>So Germans will find lots of loopholes to be covered, such as not using a German hosting first, and not stating their Web/Gopher/Gemini site as a commercial service, with no data collecting at all.
Again, this is criminal.
Again, I am aware that there are numerous technical means to circumvent this, yet all of these are criminal.
> If you accept one connection from a user in some country, you are doing business in that country.
I disagree with this. I have an open port at 80 and 443 and whoever wants to connect to it can do so. If my server is physically in the US, it only needs to obey US laws. If someone is violating their country's (weird) laws by visiting the server, that's that person's problem.
It's not my job as a developer, website host, or business owner, to for example ink out photos of women because Saudi law requires that. It's not my job to remove references to the Tiananmen incident. Those countries can, if they would like to, censor my website at their borders with a firewall, I don't care. It's not even my job to track down where your IP address is physically located. I couldn't care less about your IP. You could be using a VPN, for all I know.
Iran or China has issues with my website? They'll block it. Problem solved. I don't have to think about it too much. They do the work for me.
EU has beef with my website? Go ahead, you block it too, I don't care. I'll grab some popcorn and sit back and watch how your citizens react. (hee hee)
> And much more uncontroversially, if you are accepting payments from someone in another country, then you are definitely doing business in that country.
I disagree with this, as well, if those payments are coming from individuals and not businesses. If an individual in Germany flies over to the US and buys something from me, they are subject to US laws in that transaction. They are subject to German laws when they take that thing back. But in NO part of the entire process am I subject to German laws.
That doesn't change if "flies with an international flight" changes to "travels virtually via an international TCP connection".
>If I run, say, a porn site, hosted in the US, as a US company, is it my responsibility to prevent users in a country where pornography is illegal from using my sit
Actually you have in most cases as trade agreements and various treaties usually provide the framework to extend laws and regulations between countries.
Gambling sites for example wether they are run from the UK, Malta or CAR explicitly block US users due to US laws which prevent online gambling.
If you are running a gambling site even in some 3rd world non extradition country if you do not respect the UIGEA you'll be sanctioned and an arrest warrant will be issued faster than you can say poker stars.
> What if I refuse to provide visitor logs, is it OK for them to block my site at the border? What about to order a private teleco to block my site?
That depends exclusively on the laws of the country in question, not on the laws of the country the offender is based on. That's what a sovereign state does, it determines its own rules.
>Then Germans will have to prosecute those going to the website and using it or remove it from German DNS servers. Germany has no right to try and limit the rights of US citizens by extension of limiting those of Germans.
And? That's exactly what happened. The Telegram Operators were given a choice and they picked. If a US operator is given the same choice, they can pick no business with German users or remove the content the germans don't like. If they pick the later, you have no business to complain about that, really, since it doesn't affect you as US citizen.
>As much as I hate the Nazis, Nazi sentiment is not illegal in the USA as long as they stay within the law. The German government has no right to push their ideology and laws here. Again block Germans from the site or sue to have Parler block German user IP addresses (good luck with that, it won't last 5 minutes before the judge laughs and says "next case")
Nazis have no right to push their ideology here. Nor should they have anywhere. "They ought to be hammered back into the holes they crawled out of" to cite a recently popular music single in germany. All their ideology leads to is authoritarianism, oppression, violence and war.
The companies and/or owners of those services do operate under a certain legal aegis, though. It’s not like they are stateless.
I just happened to read the text on a food product; it had text in three languages, and the www.* domains listed in the three texts were in the ccTLD for each country. No .com was mentioned anywhere.
No.
The site is created in some set of locations, and is hosted on servers in some set of locations. If none of those locations is in Germany, Germany has no personal jurisdiction.
(At least under US law, which is what counts when it comes to enforcing judgement against someone in the US.)
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