p2p news / p2pnet: German web sites with forums are a "source of trouble" and should hire legal staff to keep an eye on them, a court has decided.

Last December Hamburg judges issued a temporary restraining order against Heise Online, forcing it to monitor comment and discussion forums.

Now, after more than four months, the first-instance district court of Hamburg has labelled web forums an "especially dangerous feature," saying anyone who runs "such a source of trouble" must be held, "especially liable".

Moderating user comments would mean the end of the fledgling forum culture in Germany, says Heise.

"We believe that this ruling is grossly unfair. If it stands, it will have severe consequences for all forum operators."

Providers were hitherto only liable for illegal content they knew about. Nor were they obligated to actively search it. But the Hamburg judges have overruled that interpretation, says Heise.

"Providing Internet forums is, they argued, a type of business operation," says the story. "Operators therefore have to be able to hire enough staff with legal training to be able to handle such operations. If the number of forums and comments in them is so great that the opposing party does not have the staff or technical means to review comments before they are published, they either have to expand their in-house resources or [...] reduce the scope of their business operations," the first-instance district court of Hamburg argued.

"Some participants in a forum for a report published at heise online about the business practices of Universal Boards made a script public that was designed to limit the operation of the company’s download services," says the story.

"The company’s lawyer, Bernhard Syndikus, promptly sent a letter to the publisher demanding that it refrain from ‘actively disseminating "reader comments" whose letter or gist incites other users to download files, in particular the program ‘k.exe’, as often as possible from my client’s servers to overload my client’s servers."

"The publisher immediately deleted the offending comments in the forum but refused to sign the formal obligation as it did not believe it had to take action if it did not know about potentially illegal comments. Although no other comments were posted with calls to overload the company’s servers after this deletion, Universal Boards nevertheless had the first-instance district court of Hamburg issue a temporary restraining order. The publisher protested against this restraining order, but the court was not to be swayed."

However, the Hamburg judges didn’t say whether or not every web forum could be held liable, "or only the services of the press".

Heise says the court statement refers to, "people who operate facilities in which content is disseminated as in the press" going on this, "also applied for companies that disseminate content via the Internet."

"Heise Zeitschriften Verlag was thus found to be propagating statements in its Web forum ‘as in the press’," it says.

"Consequently, every Internet forum probably falls under this category because the judges did not make any further distinctions."

Heise is appealing the ruling.

Also See:
restraining order – Heise liable for reader comments, December 7, 2005
Heise – First-instance district court of Hamburg says forum operators are liable for comments, April 18, 2006

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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