Any foreign company or organisation can sue your ass for whatever reasons they want - and so can you (if you can afford it that is :). What will result from such lawsuit is another story, but even costs of going into such battle versus some big corporation can be substantial for any smaller or medium sized business. You are naive if you think there are no companies in Germany that would not want to put their new competition out of business or just make their life tougher. As GOG grows its harder and harder to forever slip under the radar in local markets.

Not that long ago Valve was sued by Australian Competition and Consumer Commission due to Valve's refund policy not complying with Australian law - see http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/08/the-accc-is-suing-valve/. Of course ACCC cant close Valve offices in US, but they have quite a few censorship tools at their disposal regarding Steam accessibility in Australia.

So yeah, you can be sued from abroad and it can get serious. And whatever is GOGs market share in Germany or Australia, surely it's not something they can just write off and simply agree to be censored (unavailable) there.

Well if you there are games on this site that violate rights in the US, yes they would have to make them unavailable to you.
But afaik there are none. Only for german useres. And I think The Witcher 2 for Australian users because of nudity. Something I think is pretty dumb. Funny thing is that atleast what I observed here (in Germany and it's neighboring countries) nudity in media is not as frowned upon as it is in other part's of the world like Australia and the US. But instead here violence and gore is more often a reason for a Cut version.

Lol +1

That depends. I believe whether that's illegal is actually up to the terms of service of the service you are accessing via a VPN. I can imagine that GOG could honor the legal situation and officially restrict access to certain games while tolerating methods to circumvent these restrictions.

http://www.recht24.de/t/das-recht-auf-privatsph%C3%A4re
http://dejure.org/gesetze/GG/1.html
http://dejure.org/gesetze/GG/2.html
http://dejure.org/gesetze/GG/13.html

Being tracked without being declared a suspect is illegal while protecting your privacy is perfectly legal.
The whole GeoIP thing is more or less illegal.

As I've already said, it is impossible to live or deal in Germany without breaking laws, this way the one with the better lawyer and bought judge is always right.

Not in Australia, in fact it's officially okay to geododge. My understanding is, prosecuting geododgers was specifically omitted from Australia-US free trade negotiations.

That's surprising. I wonder which Australian politicians have been geododging.

Using VPN is not illegal in general, maybe I used the wrong words. But as far as I am concerned you are not allowed to pretend you are from another country to buy the games you are not allowed to buy in the first place. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Really? Interesting. I always thought they required by law to prohibit the use of VPN to access the games. But as I said earlier I am by no means a lawyer.

You've got me wrong, I was not expressing concern on the current state of things (though law makers might get other perhaps "better" ideas in the future). I just think this whole system is idiotic, that's all - it should not be there in the first place. But it is... even if it doesn't quite work...

It's definitely a gray zone at best. It depends on the terms of use. In some cases though (and with the geoip system in general), it takes the responsibility away from the retailer and passes it on to the buyer.

I'm hardly an expert on law in general, but I don't think it's illegal to buy/own these games in Germany, just selling/distributing them is the problem (and may have legal repercussions).

It is not illegal. You are just not allowed to buy them.
There are basicly 3 ways a game can go in Germany.

1. It can get a rating (0,6,12,16,18)
2. It can get indexed, this happenes when game get's no rating. Either because the publisher didn't request a review or because it is too brutal or conflicts in any other way. Games can still be bought in a store or elswhere and you are allowed to own them. You are just not allowed to promote these games.
3. It can get seized. This sounds hard but you are still allowed to own them no problem. But you are not allowed to sell them anywhere in Germany. This happens when a judge decides the game violates the laws in Germany like Commando did with the Nazi symbolic. BUT there is a "german friendly" version of the game where all Nazi symbolic is removed. It got a rating of 16 and you are allowed to promote, buy and own it in germany no problem. But gog.com does not proviede this version only the english original. So they removed it for german users.

I hope this clears it up a bit :)

I don't know for sure but I would be very surprised if the law imposed such specific rules.

Sorry but where abouts on this site does it specify whcih games are unavailable and where?

It is not written anywhere. If a game is blocked for you country you will just not see it in the catalogue. That is why we have this thread to keep track of such games and where they are locked.

Here:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/regional_locked_games_on_gog/post1