from Hacker News

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

by JungleNavigator on 2/8/14, 8:46 AM with 53 comments

  • by bowlofpetunias on 2/8/14, 12:08 PM

    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.

  • by lucb1e on 2/8/14, 12:30 PM

    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.

  • by PythonicAlpha on 2/8/14, 3:17 PM

    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.

  • by oneeyedpigeon on 2/8/14, 10:20 AM

    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.

  • by Snoddas on 2/8/14, 11:00 AM

    Original article is much more informative. http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tech-industry/3501030/german...

  • by th0br0 on 2/8/14, 9:33 AM

    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-reg...

  • by enscr on 2/8/14, 1:58 PM

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

  • by us0r on 2/8/14, 10:24 AM

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

  • by pbhjpbhj on 2/8/14, 12:09 PM

    >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.

  • by Oculus on 2/8/14, 2:36 PM

    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 - Shopify CEO discussing international expansion.

  • by CalRobert on 2/8/14, 12:26 PM

    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.

  • by mariuolo on 2/8/14, 2:41 PM

    A most dangerous precedent.

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

  • by ESBoston on 2/8/14, 12:34 PM

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