A previous ruling of the Hamburg court that made moderators of internet forums liable for content posted on their sites is now contradicted by the Intermediate Court of Appeals in Dusseldorf which has ruled that forum operators are obligated to delete illegal comments made by their users only in case they know about them.
The ruling of the German Supreme Court of 2004 obliged the forum operators to prevent illegal content posted by their users but did not bind them to review all comments before being placed online. However, in the Heise Zeitschriften Verlag case, the Hamburg court ruled against Heise, asking from the publisher to monitor the content before it appeared online.
The Hamburg court had required the operator to "either increase its funding or limit ... its operations" in order to review all postings before publishing them online.
In the case of a person having been repeatedly insulted on a forum who filed a temporary restraining order, the appeal court of Dusseldorf overruled the decision of the first-instance court to issue the order, considered that monitoring all postings would have required unreasonable efforts from the forum operator from the financial as well as human resources point of view.
It is not expected from the operators to actively look for breaches of the law or to monitor all postings. However, they have the obligation to delete or block comments about which complaints have been made.
Also the Dusseldorf judges believed that the technical filtering solutions were not effective in blocking illegal contents."While a search for certain key words might be simple from the technical point of view and would even help combat violations of trademark, in light of the almost infinite number of ways that people can formulate insults such filters would not be very practical in the prosecution of violations of personal rights."
First-instance district court of Hamburg says forum operators are liable for
comments (18.04.2006)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/72085
German court rules moderators liable for forum comments (21.04.2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/21/moderator_liable_for_comments/
Court rules that prior review of forum comments is unreasonable (15.06.2006)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/74320
EDRi-gram : Hamburg court rules against forum providers (26.04.2006)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.8/forum