7 ms·

German Court Says Domain Registrars Are Responsible for Content on a Website

th0br0 13y ago
This ruling is not final yet, and Key-Systems is likely to go into revision. (see [1], German) Especially the consequences this would have for DNS changes etc., it is highly unlikely that a higher instance won't overturn the ruling although IANAL. [1] http://www.golem.de/news/landgericht-saarbruecken-domain-registrar-haftet-fuer-bittorrent-tracker-h33t-com-1402-104441.html http://www.golem.de/news/landgericht-saarbruecken-domain-reg...
oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
Thank god there's no other way to address a server on the Internet, and that this measure will once and for all stop all copyright infringements, whilst being utterly implementable and policable.
- thisiswrong 13y ago
  And thank the lord that governments like those of the UK don't already send out unlawful extrajudicial domain termination requests to registrars. Thank god systems like NameCoin and P2P distributed websites are not being developed as we speak by internet visionaries.
  - hoggle 13y ago
    I'm also thankful for non existing information on non existing technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin#Uses https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions-old/wiki/OT-Replaces-DNS https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions-old/wiki...
us0r 13y ago
People like to complain about laws/regulation/tax/etc. in the US but it is on an entirely different level in the EU.
- tluyben2 13y ago
  Germany is not the EU and this is not final; it'll never pass EU wide nor will it in Germany for that matter.
  - us0r 13y ago
    Germany is the epitome of the EU. Pass or not Germany and the EU has way more regulation then the US. My point was people who like to complain about regulation here should take a peek across the pond.
    - pjump 13y ago
      My impression is that EU countries have annoyingly too much regulation for businesses and tend to afford individuals much more freedom than people have in the US. In the US, it seems to be the other way around.
      - vwinsyee 13y ago
        But in the US, corporations are people too! [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
    - tluyben2 13y ago
      We definitely have too much regulation for companies here, but on the other hand you cannot really gain much with lawsuits as everyone does kind of act to what is common sense. Unless you did something which is obviously wrong (defraud taxes, steal actual money), no matter what comes out of court usually doesn't impact much / anything for companies. Unlike the US I believe.
    - tomp 13y ago
      Why would that be bad? The point of regulation is to prevent market inefficiencies, abuses, scams and similar. Regulation is the reason EU customers know how much they will pay for items (VAT included), know what the final flight prices will be, can have mobile subscriptions costing less than 25€ per month, get vacation, sick days and pregnancy leave, ...
Snoddas 13y ago
Original article is much more informative. http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tech-industry/3501030/german-court-finds-domain-registrar-liable-for-torrent-sites-copyright-infringement/ http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tech-industry/3501030/german...
- JungleNavigator 13y ago
  oh..., you are right, I should have submitted that instead (pity I can't change URL now)
- qwerta 13y ago
  And totally different from the post here. > The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe had already ruled that DENIC is generally not liable for rights violations, the verdict showed. > However, the Regional Court of Saarbrücken found that the rights violations of h33t.com were obvious and easy to identify, said Brüß. > Since the album was still shared through h33t after several requests sent to the website's operator by Key-Systems to stop the infringing activity, the registrar had to act to stop the infringement, the court found.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Ridiculously misleading headline. No, this is not what the court has said. In fact they pretty much explicitly said the opposite, i.e., in principle they are not liable. The court has said that a supplier that clearly knows that it is supplying services to an illegal operation should stop supplying those services. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, it is applied to all kinds of things. The problem comes when it is applied to alleged copyright infringement, and it becomes even more problematic when it's indirect, like with torrent indexing sites. That is something that is very difficult to ascertain, and it should not be left up to ISP's, registrars, telco's and alike to decide whether or not copyright infringement is going on.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  > There's nothing wrong with that in principle There kind of is. It's making the assumption that an "illegal operation" is a binary thing deserving of absolute condemnation. It isn't saying that you can't, for example, sell a counterfeiter a money press, but rather that you can't provide him (or any other "criminal") with a loaf of bread, or a tank of gas, or a room for the night in winter, or a phone, etc. It's practically a death sentence without even a trial, and on top of that it makes no allowance for the proportionality of the sanctions to the alleged offense. Sorry, you're a known litterbug, no one may sell you insulin for your diabetes. And so it is with domain names. You turn off somebody's domain name, you're taking away their forum to inform the public of your error in wrongly accusing them of misconduct. You're turning off their email and disabling their ongoing correspondence with their attorneys and their community. It's blanket censorship. You're not turning off their infringing operation, you're turning off their existence in the communications network. And to the extent that you aren't, the sanctions will be ineffective at preventing the alleged misconduct. As a policy it makes no sense.
  - RogerL 13y ago
    No, you've shut down that one domain, not made it impossible for them to own legal domain names, or otherwise be on the internet. Not that I agree with the law, but you seem to be rather overstating the repercussions. If I was renting to you, and found out you were cooking and distributing meth in the house, I would evict you. That would not mean you could never live in a house again, just that you can't do your crime on my property.
pbhjpbhj 13y ago
>A domain name registrar can be held liable for the copyright infringements of a website it registered if it is obvious the domain is used for infringements and the registrar does nothing to prevent it, the Regional Court of Saarbrücken in Germany has ruled. // The court is going to have to define what "obvious use of a domain for copyright infringement" means in order for companies to make such a decision. For example a torrent tracker isn't copyright infringing, it may be considered in court to be a contributory infringement [? don't know German caselaw on this?] but that's a non-obvious call for a company to make without the benefit of expert advisers. Trackers point to [not exclusively] infringing material, like Google/Bing point to infringing material. Indeed it may be impossible for a tracker host to establish the legality of any particular torrent without court powers to seize evidence and call witnesses and such.
CalRobert 13y ago
Interestingly, this sort of request isn't limited to registrars. I did a bit of work with a registry for some new gTLD's (not a program I support; my former employer became involved in the business) and they had already planned for dealing with takedowns of domains at the registry (not registrar) level.
lucb1e 13y ago
Yeah and Mercedes is responsible for my speeding ticket. They purposefully make their cars able to exceed the speed limit of 50km/h inside cities.
- SixSigma 13y ago
  I have always wondered why one is able to sell a car that can go over 100mph when the maximum speed allowed on the roads in my country is 70mph and being caught going 100mph will land you in jail. We already know people cannot be trusted to "do the right thing" so high speed incidents will, and do, occur. As Richard Miller wrote in SQUED [1] "Show me a man that has never broken the law and I'll show you a man that has never driven a car." [1] http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/richard+miller/squed/4929163/ http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/richard+m...
  - noblethrasher 13y ago
    Apparently, the Japanese version of the Nissan GTR has software that limits the vehicle's maximum speed unless it is near a Nissan approved racetrack. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_GT-R#Aftermarket_tuning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_GT-R#Aftermarket_tuning
  - icebraining 13y ago
    I don't know about your country, but in some countries there are private race tracks where you can speed legally for a few thousand bucks.
    - sk5t 13y ago
      Seconed - in the US, motor clubs often rent out racetracks for High Performance Driver Education (HPDE) days; costs around $500 for a few hours of track time in your own vehicle, optionally with an instructor. It's a lot of fun and educational indeed.
    - DennisP 13y ago
      And in Germany you can drive as fast as you want on the Autobahn.
ESBoston 13y ago
I don't see how this enforcement would be practical.
enscr 13y ago
That's like saying the president is responsible for all crimes in the country.
Oculus 13y ago
This isn't the first time the German government is doing something like this. Previously, they've established laws that dictate the way in which buttons must be presented on ecommerce websites[1]. 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBaDs0sGPw&t=38m18s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBaDs0sGPw&t=38m18s - Shopify CEO discussing international expansion.
- gurkendoktor 13y ago
  Except this time it wasn't the German government but a single (local) judge - whereas the "Buttongesetz" was indeed promoted by the federal minister of justice, who was trying to address end-user complaints. A better comparison would be that people with an open WiFi are liable for what their users do in Germany. Which means that small shops rarely offer WiFi, and large chains track people's identities as if they were Google.
mariuolo 13y ago
A most dangerous precedent. It would be nice if common norms in this regard were codified EU-wide.
PythonicAlpha 13y ago
As other people here addressed correctly: That ruling is not final. But it is true, that particularly lower German courts (some names are in the news again and again) have a long record of decisions that just show one thing: Many German judges have completely not understood computers and the internet. While judges might not needed to in general, they at least should take advice -- possibly by their own grandson? -- before they just make that kind of decisions.
- pi-err 13y ago
  Judges (continental Europe) apply the law. It's a different tradition than common law. They do interpret it though it leads you so far. My guess is that what those decisions mean is that the law needs a big change, especially on responsibility regime inherited from the Napoleon code.
  - mtrimpe 13y ago
    Laws are also usually changed by a lower judge deliberately deciding to interpret a law literally, which will mean it gets passed on to higher courts with the authority to (initiate) changes to the law. Not saying that is the case here though, but in law things are often not directly what they seem.
  - PythonicAlpha 13y ago
    It is right, that in continental Europe, there is less freedom to judges interpreting the law. In theory they are bound to the law and have no own judging freedom as in the US. BUT: This is theory. When you see the details of many decisions (I did not look into this one), there is still plenty of freedom to "interpret" the law. Also what they have to do is, analyse the situation to interpret the law. When the analysis is wrong, the decision comes out wrong. In many cases, the analysis just showed up plenty of disregard of computer reality. One example lately happened, when a judge thought, that it would be possible to prohibit the viewing of images without the surrounding html file. Everybody with some knowledge of internet knows, that it is not! Thus the judging came out ridiculous ... it must still be challenged. I don't want to defend German laws of course -- they are oftentimes ridiculous to! But there are just plenty of cases, where no law regarding computer techniques plainly exist. Then judges have to go by common law and interpret it for computer usage ... and there the situation analysis is crucial.

This ruling is not final yet, and Key-Systems is likely to go into revision. (see [1], German) Especially the consequences this would have for DNS changes etc., it is highly unlikely that a higher instance won't overturn the ruling although IANAL. [1] http://www.golem.de/news/landgericht-saarbruecken-domain-registrar-haftet-fuer-bittorrent-tracker-h33t-com-1402-104441.html http://www.golem.de/news/landgericht-saarbruecken-domain-reg...

oneeyedpigeon 13y ago

Thank god there's no other way to address a server on the Internet, and that this measure will once and for all stop all copyright infringements, whilst being utterly implementable and policable.

thisiswrong 13y ago
And thank the lord that governments like those of the UK don't already send out unlawful extrajudicial domain termination requests to registrars. Thank god systems like NameCoin and P2P distributed websites are not being developed as we speak by internet visionaries.
- hoggle 13y ago
  I'm also thankful for non existing information on non existing technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin#Uses https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions-old/wiki/OT-Replaces-DNS https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions-old/wiki...

us0r 13y ago

People like to complain about laws/regulation/tax/etc. in the US but it is on an entirely different level in the EU.

tluyben2 13y ago
Germany is not the EU and this is not final; it'll never pass EU wide nor will it in Germany for that matter.
- us0r 13y ago
  Germany is the epitome of the EU. Pass or not Germany and the EU has way more regulation then the US. My point was people who like to complain about regulation here should take a peek across the pond.
  - pjump 13y ago
    My impression is that EU countries have annoyingly too much regulation for businesses and tend to afford individuals much more freedom than people have in the US. In the US, it seems to be the other way around.
    - vwinsyee 13y ago
      But in the US, corporations are people too! [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    We definitely have too much regulation for companies here, but on the other hand you cannot really gain much with lawsuits as everyone does kind of act to what is common sense. Unless you did something which is obviously wrong (defraud taxes, steal actual money), no matter what comes out of court usually doesn't impact much / anything for companies. Unlike the US I believe.
  - tomp 13y ago
    Why would that be bad? The point of regulation is to prevent market inefficiencies, abuses, scams and similar. Regulation is the reason EU customers know how much they will pay for items (VAT included), know what the final flight prices will be, can have mobile subscriptions costing less than 25€ per month, get vacation, sick days and pregnancy leave, ...

Snoddas 13y ago

Original article is much more informative. http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tech-industry/3501030/german-court-finds-domain-registrar-liable-for-torrent-sites-copyright-infringement/ http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tech-industry/3501030/german...

JungleNavigator 13y ago
oh..., you are right, I should have submitted that instead (pity I can't change URL now)
qwerta 13y ago
And totally different from the post here. > The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe had already ruled that DENIC is generally not liable for rights violations, the verdict showed. > However, the Regional Court of Saarbrücken found that the rights violations of h33t.com were obvious and easy to identify, said Brüß. > Since the album was still shared through h33t after several requests sent to the website's operator by Key-Systems to stop the infringing activity, the registrar had to act to stop the infringement, the court found.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Ridiculously misleading headline. No, this is not what the court has said. In fact they pretty much explicitly said the opposite, i.e., in principle they are not liable. The court has said that a supplier that clearly knows that it is supplying services to an illegal operation should stop supplying those services. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, it is applied to all kinds of things. The problem comes when it is applied to alleged copyright infringement, and it becomes even more problematic when it's indirect, like with torrent indexing sites. That is something that is very difficult to ascertain, and it should not be left up to ISP's, registrars, telco's and alike to decide whether or not copyright infringement is going on.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
> There's nothing wrong with that in principle There kind of is. It's making the assumption that an "illegal operation" is a binary thing deserving of absolute condemnation. It isn't saying that you can't, for example, sell a counterfeiter a money press, but rather that you can't provide him (or any other "criminal") with a loaf of bread, or a tank of gas, or a room for the night in winter, or a phone, etc. It's practically a death sentence without even a trial, and on top of that it makes no allowance for the proportionality of the sanctions to the alleged offense. Sorry, you're a known litterbug, no one may sell you insulin for your diabetes. And so it is with domain names. You turn off somebody's domain name, you're taking away their forum to inform the public of your error in wrongly accusing them of misconduct. You're turning off their email and disabling their ongoing correspondence with their attorneys and their community. It's blanket censorship. You're not turning off their infringing operation, you're turning off their existence in the communications network. And to the extent that you aren't, the sanctions will be ineffective at preventing the alleged misconduct. As a policy it makes no sense.
- RogerL 13y ago
  No, you've shut down that one domain, not made it impossible for them to own legal domain names, or otherwise be on the internet. Not that I agree with the law, but you seem to be rather overstating the repercussions. If I was renting to you, and found out you were cooking and distributing meth in the house, I would evict you. That would not mean you could never live in a house again, just that you can't do your crime on my property.

pbhjpbhj 13y ago

>A domain name registrar can be held liable for the copyright infringements of a website it registered if it is obvious the domain is used for infringements and the registrar does nothing to prevent it, the Regional Court of Saarbrücken in Germany has ruled. // The court is going to have to define what "obvious use of a domain for copyright infringement" means in order for companies to make such a decision. For example a torrent tracker isn't copyright infringing, it may be considered in court to be a contributory infringement [? don't know German caselaw on this?] but that's a non-obvious call for a company to make without the benefit of expert advisers. Trackers point to [not exclusively] infringing material, like Google/Bing point to infringing material. Indeed it may be impossible for a tracker host to establish the legality of any particular torrent without court powers to seize evidence and call witnesses and such.

CalRobert 13y ago

Interestingly, this sort of request isn't limited to registrars. I did a bit of work with a registry for some new gTLD's (not a program I support; my former employer became involved in the business) and they had already planned for dealing with takedowns of domains at the registry (not registrar) level.

lucb1e 13y ago

Yeah and Mercedes is responsible for my speeding ticket. They purposefully make their cars able to exceed the speed limit of 50km/h inside cities.

SixSigma 13y ago
I have always wondered why one is able to sell a car that can go over 100mph when the maximum speed allowed on the roads in my country is 70mph and being caught going 100mph will land you in jail. We already know people cannot be trusted to "do the right thing" so high speed incidents will, and do, occur. As Richard Miller wrote in SQUED [1] "Show me a man that has never broken the law and I'll show you a man that has never driven a car." [1] http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/richard+miller/squed/4929163/ http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/richard+m...
- noblethrasher 13y ago
  Apparently, the Japanese version of the Nissan GTR has software that limits the vehicle's maximum speed unless it is near a Nissan approved racetrack. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_GT-R#Aftermarket_tuning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_GT-R#Aftermarket_tuning
- icebraining 13y ago
  I don't know about your country, but in some countries there are private race tracks where you can speed legally for a few thousand bucks.
  - sk5t 13y ago
    Seconed - in the US, motor clubs often rent out racetracks for High Performance Driver Education (HPDE) days; costs around $500 for a few hours of track time in your own vehicle, optionally with an instructor. It's a lot of fun and educational indeed.
  - DennisP 13y ago
    And in Germany you can drive as fast as you want on the Autobahn.

ESBoston 13y ago

I don't see how this enforcement would be practical.

enscr 13y ago

That's like saying the president is responsible for all crimes in the country.

Oculus 13y ago

This isn't the first time the German government is doing something like this. Previously, they've established laws that dictate the way in which buttons must be presented on ecommerce websites[1]. 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBaDs0sGPw&t=38m18s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBaDs0sGPw&t=38m18s - Shopify CEO discussing international expansion.

gurkendoktor 13y ago
Except this time it wasn't the German government but a single (local) judge - whereas the "Buttongesetz" was indeed promoted by the federal minister of justice, who was trying to address end-user complaints. A better comparison would be that people with an open WiFi are liable for what their users do in Germany. Which means that small shops rarely offer WiFi, and large chains track people's identities as if they were Google.

mariuolo 13y ago

A most dangerous precedent. It would be nice if common norms in this regard were codified EU-wide.

PythonicAlpha 13y ago

As other people here addressed correctly: That ruling is not final. But it is true, that particularly lower German courts (some names are in the news again and again) have a long record of decisions that just show one thing: Many German judges have completely not understood computers and the internet. While judges might not needed to in general, they at least should take advice -- possibly by their own grandson? -- before they just make that kind of decisions.

pi-err 13y ago
Judges (continental Europe) apply the law. It's a different tradition than common law. They do interpret it though it leads you so far. My guess is that what those decisions mean is that the law needs a big change, especially on responsibility regime inherited from the Napoleon code.
- mtrimpe 13y ago
  Laws are also usually changed by a lower judge deliberately deciding to interpret a law literally, which will mean it gets passed on to higher courts with the authority to (initiate) changes to the law. Not saying that is the case here though, but in law things are often not directly what they seem.
- PythonicAlpha 13y ago
  It is right, that in continental Europe, there is less freedom to judges interpreting the law. In theory they are bound to the law and have no own judging freedom as in the US. BUT: This is theory. When you see the details of many decisions (I did not look into this one), there is still plenty of freedom to "interpret" the law. Also what they have to do is, analyse the situation to interpret the law. When the analysis is wrong, the decision comes out wrong. In many cases, the analysis just showed up plenty of disregard of computer reality. One example lately happened, when a judge thought, that it would be possible to prohibit the viewing of images without the surrounding html file. Everybody with some knowledge of internet knows, that it is not! Thus the judging came out ridiculous ... it must still be challenged. I don't want to defend German laws of course -- they are oftentimes ridiculous to! But there are just plenty of cases, where no law regarding computer techniques plainly exist. Then judges have to go by common law and interpret it for computer usage ... and there the situation analysis is crucial.