German court says forum admins must manually approve comments
Many websites allow visitors to write posts and leave comments. Sometimes the visitors are assholes, and leave comments that are (in the relevant jurisdiction) illegal speech — warez, libels, plans for a terrorist attack, that sort of thing. At which point someone (typically a company that is losing money due to the forum post) will fire off an angry email to the forum admins. The admins will read the complaint and then delete or censor the post, if they believe the complaint is valid; they might even provide the company with the IP address of the poster. Furthermore, forum admins will typically monitor a forum and try to remove the blatantly illegal (e.g. paeodphilic) posts. At least in the US, various safe harbor provisions will protect a forum admin as long as he responds to complaints and does his due diligence to take down blatantly illegal stuff reasonably quickly. As a typical example, consider the recent Seigenthaler case where John Seigenthaler started to sue an anonymous Wikipedia contributor who insinuated that Seigenthaler had assassinated Kennedy. Notably, Wikipedia itself was legally in the clear.
Well, in Germany, it looks like they do things differently. Heise.de is a German tech news site with extensive and popular forums. Some heise readers used the forums to plan a denial-of-service attack against Universal Boards. Universal Boards complained to heise admins, and heise admins immediately removed the offending posts. But that did not satisfy Universal Boards, who went to court, and December 6 a Hamburg judge agreed with them in a truly horrible ruling. The judge, in effect, forced heise admins to manually read and approve all new forum posts in case they might violate the rights of Universal Boards. In other words: it is not enough to glance through threads once in a while and delete offending posts; the offending posts must not be allowed to be posted in the first place. Since I am sure that Universal Boards is not the only company in the world that has beef with some heise forum member, heise admins might soon find themselves working as proxies for fifty different companies’ legal teams. If the admins slack off, heise will be legally liable. Notice that by applying the same logic, your ISP should employ someone to manually approve your emails (in case your email might offend someone), and your phone company should make you sign an affidavit before calling your friend — just in case you plan to tell him something illegal. The ruling is idiotic, the judge demonstrates a total ignorance of how the internet works, and heise, of course, is appealing.
If this ruling is not overturned on appeal, it will make it extremely risky to operate any website in Germany that allows users to leave comments. To avoid legal liability, forums, wikis, blogs, stores that allow customer reviews, perhaps even mailing list archives, might all be forced to move to other European countries with saner laws (if any such are left).