Comment by phicoh

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.

If you look at it from an EU perspective, if you download a book that still falls under copyright in the EU (without permisison) and the server is in the EU, then obviously this is a copyright violation and the person who makes the work available on the server has a problem.

If the server is not in the EU, then the person downloading the book is essentially importing a copyrighted work into the EU without permission of the owner. Which is also a copyright violation.

Then the question becomes to what extent the person who makes the work available has ties to the EU. The stronger the ties, the more effort can be required to avoid such illegal imports. For example, if there would be ads targeted at the German public, then courts would be very quick that this falls under jurisdiction of German courts.

So people in German who would use a VPN to get around the block, who still violate copyright law in Germany.