German legislation sucks « More shameless remarks by Larko

German legislation sucks

Monday, April 24, 2006 at 20:33 | In Bloggers' rights, Blogosphere, Germany | 5 Comments

Here we go again, another incident of a blogger in Germany threatened with a lawsuite! Marcel Bartels of Mein Parteibuch received a phone call this afternoon giving him 24 hours to delete a blog post or face lawsuite. To give a comprehensive coverage of this and similar cases would require a full time activity of reading articles, analyzing them and writing comments. As I am not in a position to cover this field on a full time basis, I am just going to give some links to the background and make a couple of general points.

The short story behind this incident is that somebody registered a trade mark in Germany very similar to the Canadian fashionware brand Dsquared2. They say they are in the textile business under the German based business brand Dsquared Ltd but it appears like their main line of business would be to sue people selling Dsquared labeled second hand clothes in e-bay. There is a summary of the topic in Berlin Blawg.

According to Marcel, the gentleman calling him said that he is the trade mark owner of Dsquared in Germany and Marcel is supposedly not entitled to use the word in his blog posts. Now, how ridiculous is that not? If I register the trade mark United Nations in Germany, can I honestly stop all German based blogs write about United Nations?

The disputed post was mostly refering to what was already published about the topic by the web site Rettet das Internet. The site is dedicated to exposing the ridiculous situation in Germany that has occured as a result of the legislature adopting laws that seek to regulate the Internet but are based on little or no knowledge of how Internet actually works. I highly recommend the site as there is a number of detailed case studies in this area.

The German legislature Bundestag seems to be under the illusion that it is possible and even desirable to regulate something as global as the Internet by legislation and court practice in one single country. By adopting diffused laws with no baring with the real essence of the web the Bundestag has opened the door for adventurous fortune seekers that try to make money by suing people. But more importantly, they have created a justice vacuum where the freedom of speech is jeopardized.

You may ask why I would care about this. I have not blogged in German for months and the rest of my blogs are in servers outside Germany, as I am myself, too. The answer is obvious. Germany is one of the biggest and most influencial member countries of the European Union. If dubious court pratices are allowed to press down the freedom of speech in Germany today, the same will be a part of EU legislation tomorrow. And I just do not want to live up to that date.

5 Comments »

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Larko,

thank you for your great coverage of the topic.

In fact, the problem with freedom of speech against any type of scam is already on a European level. If you have a look into http://www.stopecg.org , you see a lot of flags there. My personal opinion is, that we are already world wide in the middle of the battle for the right of free speech.

Thank you for your attention

Marcel

Comment by Marcel — Monday, April 24, 2006 #
Marcel, you are absolutely right that Germany is not the only country with this sort of problems but the German legal situation is such that it encourages prosperous people to try the legal road of mouth gagging bloggers. The German incidents also receive more attention than similar cases elsewhere because the number of blogs and web sites is huge and the blogging community is large enough to make its voice heard. That is, of course, a blessing in disguise.

The Estonian parliament has a bill on its table that seeks to turn the court practice closer to what the situation is in Germany. I shall try to find time to post about the bill in the near future. Here in Finland we had the case of Restaurant Lehtovaara that tried to sue the ass of a blogger who blogged about bad service he received in the restaurant. The blogger just happened to be a lawyer specialized in the legal issues of the Internet.

Comment by Larko — Tuesday, April 25, 2006 #
[...] More shameless remarks by Larko My voice in the Web – about anything and everything, sometimes even nothing « German legislation sucks [...]

Pingback by More shameless remarks by Larko » Blog Archive » Dirk Meyer of Hattersheim — Wednesday, April 26, 2006 #
The Case relateing to http://www.stopecg.org is a little different. The website exposes scams run by a German citizen who appears to now live in Spain called Meinolf Lüdenbach.

What Ludenbach, or at least one of his companies did was threaten the service providers. Under UK law once a service provider is notified of content it bears joint liability for libellous material it is hosting if it does not pull it down.

The problem here appears to be that anyone who does not like being exposed can write to the host company and claim that content is libellous, it is then very likely that the host will remove the content without properly checking the claim as they do not want to get drawn into a legal dispute.

Comment by Landor — Friday, April 28, 2006 #
Landor, that sort of legislation is just as logical as it would be to hold the Royal Mail responsible for the contents of the letters they carry.

Comment by Larko — Friday, April 28, 2006 #