So yeah, while the language issue is only part of the judicial reasoning, is is indeed mentioned three times in the judicial conclusions. The court does not however appear to adopt plaintiff's theory on jurisdiction because some of the volunteers were German.
As such, I'm inclined to think that while the focus on the language issue is perhaps a bit overstated in their statement, it is definitely grounded in the opinion of the court.
As an aside though, I'm not convinced the court spent too much time considering the jurisdictional arguments here, which I think are probably the most important part of this case. Most of the analysis is concerned with whether the publisher plausibly alleged they own the copyright. I assume that is because that is usually the primary point of contention in copyright cases.
The US doesn't enforce those judgements any more, but the UK still holds the principle.
Not completely nuts, but definitely an overreach.
You're saying it like it's a bad thing. If US has better laws than Germany and businesses serving Germans want to choose that jurisdiction because of it, it's "competition", not a "loophole". Otherwise another "loophole" we could find is that some Germans, seeking lower taxes and high standards of living, and more beneficial laws, may just move to US altogether, thus depriving German state of much needed tax income and stopping being subjects to German laws. We wouldn't want them to plug that "loophole", do we?
How perverse. If you extrapolate this, any web site warning anybody about anything could be seen as endorsing that activity. "Child pornography is illegal and not supported by this web site" becomes "You knew there were child pornographers accessing your web site and this is proof you were aiding and abetting child pornography".
It's like a Russian child pornography site warning that American members might be investigated by the FBI. If it didn't care about American members, it wouldn't put out such notice.
Likewise in your example, merely warning user _shouldn't_ make the operators subject to a foreign court. Said court would be able to seize equipment in its jurisdiction, pursue local users, compel payment processors not to do business with them etc., but a site operating legally wholly within its home jurisdiction (i.e. location of staff/business/servers etc.) shouldn't be subject to an overseas court merely because it is accessible from that location. It seems almost untenable that a site could comply with the local laws of every possible jurisdiction that may access the site.
While this, indeed, does mean you have to comply with the local laws of every possible jurisdiction, that's exactly what's happening today. Sometimes it's easier to comply (like Youtube blocking videos in Turkey), sometimes it's easier to pull out (like Google pulling out of China), and sometimes you just really don't care and let them do whatever they want (get yourself blocked like Facebook in many banana republics). It all boils down to how much effort you want to put in. Filtering certain content on your site can quickly prove laborious, as opposed to the trivial effort of just instituting a blanket IP ban as a response to takedown requests.
If you don't heed foreign courts, you're just asking for trouble. You might be out of their jurisdiction today but get into hot water when you ever travel there. You can't have your cake and eat it too, just like you can't make content available to citizens of a foreign jurisdiction without complying to their laws.
It is only mentioned in the plaintiff's complaint though, not in the reasoning by the court.
It might be slightly dishonest, but it's at least pointing the user in the direction of the actual culprit. Imho this is a valid approach because it creates awareness for a problem that the vast majority of people are never really aware of.
They don't get jurisdiction instead of Austria; the court rules it had jurisdiction to hear the claim brought before it, not that Austrian courts would lack such jurisdiction.
Jurisdiction is very often not exclusive.