Work that’s PD in the US but not in Germany. German rights-holders took PG to court (or rather, a poor German sysadmin for PG), court demanded PG pull the titles for Germany, PG refused saying that it was down to the users to determine PD status for their home country, and because of HTTPS the German court’s only option was to block PG at the domain level.

Project Gutenberg themselves decided to block all access from Germany instead of just the items in question.

„On February 9 2018, the Court issued a judgment granting essentially most of the Plaintiff's demands. The Court did not order that the 18 items no longer be made available by Project Gutenberg, and instead wrote that it is sufficient to instead make them no longer accessible to German Internet (IP) addresses.

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.“, from https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html

Helpful page, with much useful information.

Never ceases to amaze me how one can be 'into' a subject and miss huge 'in plain sight' news.

When I lived in London I stopped buying TimeOut to find out whatson, and instead simply paid closer attention to Tube posters.