Monthly Archives: August 2012

The Pope’s litigation against a German magazine

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The following is certainly not really a matter of IT-Law but I bet you will find it interesting anyway.

This post is about a law suit Pope Benedict XVI. started against Titanic (nice case reference, isn’t it?), a well-known German satire magazine. We all expected today a hearing to take place at the Hamburg Regional Court – but it was canceled just last night, as the Pope had withdrawn his petition.

It has already been written a lot on whether this case is an example for censorship or some kind of litmus test for the freedom of speech in Germany. I don’t think that this really what makes the case so interesting. I believe that the question we should discuss is whether a pope should defend his personality rights by going to a civil court. Continue reading →

New court ruling on GEMA and Creative Commons licensing

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Yesterday I came across a ruling by the Local Court (Amtsgericht) of Frankfurt/Main on the conflict between GEMA (which stands for: Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte, in English: Society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights) and Creative Commons licensing. I think it is a good opportunity to briefly explain a tricky little, but important feature of the German system of the collective management of copyrights: the GEMA-Vermutung (GEMA presumption). Continue reading →

My day at FrOSCon: Interesting stuff from DTAG and my talk on “GPLv2 and embedded systems”

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A couple of months ago, the organizers of the FrOSCon, one of Germany’s big Open Source developer conferences, asked me if I could present a talk at this year’s edition of the conference. I gladly accepted, and so I spent last Saturday in (West) Germany’s former capital Bonn. I had a tremendous day, even though I could attend just a few of the almost a hundred talks, workshops and seminars. Continue reading →

General Data Protection Regulation: Council of the EU’s Amendments to the Commission’s Draft

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Last weekend, an amended draft of the Regulation of the European Parliament and the Council on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (General Data Protection Regulation) was published by the British organization statewatch. The proposed changes regard Articles 1-10, 80 (a), 83 and several recitals. While some of them simply clarify the first draft, others – as for example the definition of the term “personal data” in Article 4 Subsection 1 – will have great effects on data protection in Germany. Continue reading →

Disclosure Obligations for Access Providers or “What exactly needs to be commercial?”

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In order to pursue copyright infringements, rightholders need the names and addresses of the infringers. This creates special problems in file sharing cases where the identity of those who illegally use file sharing systems needs to be found out by checking who’s behind a specific IP address. Detecting copyright infringements and collecting the IP addresses of the responsible persons are just the first steps to this end. But then, the rightholders have no choice but to ask the respective ISP to hand out the data it has about the IP addresses discovered. ISPs for their part need to protect their customers and their business and have to comply with strict statutory data protection provisions. Thus, ISPs and copyright holders are in a permanent conflict of interests. Continue reading →

E-Commerce Law Reports with our article on Oracle v. UsedSoft

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As a blogger you are always happy to receive feedback from your readers. So I was really pleased when shortly after posting my recent comments about the CJEU’s UsedSoft decision, the E-Commerce Law Reports approached me to ask whether I could write a more detailed article about the case for their August 2012 issue. Recently published, this issue also contains a number of other fascinating contributions by colleagues from around the world on a variety of important topics such as the online collection of consumer data, search engines’ liability for misleading search results, the cloning of games, advertising on Twitter, etc. Check it out: http://www.e-comlaw.com/e-commerce-law-reports/

Disguised Advertising in the Wikipedia

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Once information is entered into the Internet’s most popular encyclopedia Wikipedia it gains an immense potential of distribution. The high number of users and the easy accessibility in combination with the impression of neutrality an encyclopedia communicates make it highly desirable for companies to be positively depicted in articles about the company itself or its products.

The Higher Regional Court of Munich decided on May 10th, 2012 that positive display of a company’s products in a Wikipedia article that was amended by the director of the company constitutes disguised advertising and thus unfair competition as defined by Section 4 No. 3 UWG (the German Law Against the Unfair Competition). Continue reading →

Injunctive relief under competition law

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Data protection is big in Europe, especially in Germany. It is not possible to process personal data without a data protection law regulation the data processing. And while data protection laws are primarily supposed to protect the individual’s right to determine how his or her data is being processed, data protection has also become a commercial factor. On the one hand, companies are restricted in their ways of advertisement towards their customers. According to section 28 subsection 3 of the Federal Data Protection Act for example, advertisement is dependent on the individual customer’s consent. On the other hand, data protection compliance demands investments in the implementation of data protection standards within the company, for example to lay down the technical and organizational measures demanded by section 9 of the Federal Data Protection Act. Continue reading →