More shameless remarks by Larko

Torsten Rahnert in Berlin has a web site entitled Callboy Torsten. Yes folks, the site is exactly about the sort of personal services you would imagine. That sort of services are perfectly legal in Germany and it is perfectly legal to market them in public to consenting adults. In other words, we are talking about adult content here.

I really would not recommend anybody to visit Callboy Torsten’s site. The design and layout are terrible. I would not even write about the site unless there was this interesting fact that Torsten does not want to be linked to. Or to be a bit more precize, he wants to be linked by sites that he likes and he seems to be on a crusade against unwanted linking. Especially against those who do not say nice things about him.

For a month ago, the blogger My big mouth was in bed at his home in Hamburg, almost asleep as he heard that a phone call was coming in. The call went to an answering machine.

He listened the message in the morning and concluded that the caller was none other than Torsten Rahnert, who was upset about being linked by My big mouth in a post a couple of days earlier. It turned out that Mr. Rahnert had also written to My big mouth’s ISP and complained about the linking. My big mouth chose to be rather safe than sorry and removed the link.

Also about a month ago, Jens Knoblich in Strausberg published this post in his blog Krambox. He quoted Callboy Torsten’s announcement that any undesired link to his site would be sued for 250 euros a day. Jens was referring to the court ruling in the case Wilhelm Entenmann vs. Marcel Bartels where the court basically threw out Mr. Entenmann’s lawsuite that seeked to ban Marcel from linking to his site.

In an update to his post, Jens writes that he received an e-mail, a phone call and an SMS message from Callboy Torsten. He writes that he was trying to be helpful against the unhappy callboy but his message did not quite get through. So he did the easy thing and deleted his link.

As Jens was also linking to Marcel’s post about his court case, a trackback appeared in Marcel’s post. The trackback displayed the sentence “Callboy Torsten does not wish to be linked” and a part of the quote from Mr. Rahnert’s announcement. Mr. Rahnert has added a comment saying that this is not true. According to him, it would depend on the context that the link is presented in.

As Marcel Bartels writes here, Mr. Rahnert made a phone call to him too. He asked Marcel to remove Jens’s trackback because it displayed him in a bad light. According to Marcel, Mr Rahnert also said during the conversation that he preferred a selective linking to his site. He would prefer not to be linked by those who express a negative opinion about him. That is kind of understandable but not quite the way the Web works.

Meanwhile in Strausberg, Jens Knoblich has received a complaint from the police that Torsten Rahnert has made about the linking. The complaint does not specify in legal terms what he is suspected for. It just says that the complainant does not wish to be linked.

So Jens has received a complaint that should never have been filed in the first place. Apparently, the police have made it easy for themselves and filed it to get rid of the callboy. They seem to have been too busy to check out that the complaint adresses something which is perfectly legal even in Germany, that is placing a hyperlink to the web site of Torsten Rahnert.

It is like if I said good morning to my next door neighbour and they would file a complaint about it. And instead of telling my neighbour that saying good morning is legal in Finland, the police would interrogate me as a suspect. That is exactly what happened to Jens Knoblich.

This whole story is so bizarre that I would never have even considered writing about it without that complaint. The guy may actually be out there to get free publicity to his services but this is just a little bit too surrealistic to be true. As Udo Vetter points out, the callboy apparently wants to be alone in the Internet. Maybe a separate Internet just for him would be what he needs.

Update: I just spotted that Marcel Bartels has added a comment (nr 20) into Udo Vetter’s post telling that Callboy Torsten has let him know that he has filed a complaint against Marcel too. Marcel has yet to receive it. If I say crazy, I do not mean anybody in particular but this whole case is just crazy!

Update (27.5.2006): Things go as crazy as they can before this show will end. As I detect, Callboy Torsten is collecting pingbacks to this entry in Elbelaw.de to file complaints against their authors. So complaints against bloggers suffocate the German police while hate crime goes on unpunished.