First-instance district court of Hamburg says forum operators are liable for comments
After more than four months, the first-instance district court of Hamburg has handed down its written statement on its widely reported ruling of December 02, 2005 on liability for forums. The statements refers to web forums as an "especially dangerous feature." Those who operate such a source of trouble, the court argued, must be held especially liable.
The previous legislation held that forum providers were only liable for illegal content that they had knowledge of and were not obligated to actively search for such; now, the judges in Hamburg have overruled that interpretation. Providing Internet forums is, they argued, a type of business operation. 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.
In the case at hand, Universal Boards and its director Mario Dolzer believe that their rights were being violated. 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. 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.
The court sees the publisher as the party that is "disturbing the peace" because it allowed inadmissible campaigns to be propagated in its forum. The court held that a publisher would have been able to prevent such incitations by "reviewing the content of the comments before publishing them." The court clearly did not believe Heise Zeitschriften Verlag's argument that constant reviewing of the content of more than 200,000 comments per month would be an unreasonable burden on the publisher.
The court did not clearly state its opinion on whether every Web forum could be held liable or only the services of the press. Its statement speaks of "people who operate facilities in which content is disseminated as in the press." The court further stated that 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." Consequently, every Internet forum probably falls under this category because the judges did not make any further distinctions.
Even before the written statement on the ruling had been handed down, lawyers had been sending out fines to operators of forums they claimed were breaking the law. Such actions will probably now become common. Heise Zeitschriften Verlag is appealing this ruling. As the publisher's legal adviser Joerg Heidrich put it, "Moderation of user comments would mean the end of the fledgling forum culture in Germany. We believe that this ruling is grossly unfair. If it stands, it will have severe consequences for all forum operators." (Craig Morris)
Германия: модераторов форумов смогут привлекать к ответственности за контент
Напомним, что ранее модератор немецкого сайта мог понести ответственность лишь за материалы, оставленные на модерируемом им форуме с его ведома. Теперь судьи считают, что если модератор не уследил за появлением на форуме незаконного контента, то это - его личные проблемы. То есть, теперь ему придется выбирать что-то одно: либо работа, либо круглосуточное модерирование форума.
Это решение было вынесено гамбургским судом в рамках рассмотрения иска компании Universal Boards против сайта Heise Online. Фирма Universal Boards широко известна своими "автодозвонщиками" и сомнительной бизнес-практикой, включая, в частности, массированную скупку просроченных доменов с последующей установкой на них редиректов на порно-сайты. Среди жертв Universal Boards присутствует и Немецкая ассоциация добровольных пожарных дружин.
Где-то с год назад один из посетителей Heise Online выложил на форуме сайта скрипт, который должен был "причинить ущерб бизнесу компании". Адвокаты Universal Boards добились тогда удаления вредоносной программы, однако не сумели заставить владельцев Heise Online дать обещание не допускать появления подобных материалов впредь. Тяжба длилась почти год и в итоге, как видим, увенчалась успехом. Правда, владелец Heise Online пока не намерен опускать руки и собирается подать апелляцию, пишет The Register.
