(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

On 25 January 2006, the District Court of Darmstadt (Germany) ruled that the German ISP T-Online was legally banned from logging the session IP addresses it assigned to its customers. German law requires this data to be deleted upon termination of the connection as it is not needed for billing purposes. According to the judgement, security requirements do not justify the general logging of all users' IP addresses. The collection of such data is permitted only in reaction to specific incidents (faults or unlawful use) on a case by case basis.

On 28 October 2006 The German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) dismissed, on formal grounds, the appeal filed by T-Online. The District Court's ruling has thereby become legally binding between the parties of the dispute. The legal reasoning of the court applies more generally to all German ISPs and to all tariff models. A draft complaint for other Germans willing to sue their ISP was published on the internet. The German Federal Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar announced that he would take steps to enforce the ruling in relation to all customers.

The plaintiff Holger Voss was prosecuted in 2003 for supposedly having endorsed the 9/11 bomb attacks in an Internet forum. Only in court room was it found that his remarks were clearly of a sarcastic nature. In consequence, Voss was acquitted. In order to trace Voss' forum post, the prosecutors had asked the forum provider Heise to hand over the poster's IP address. Voss' ISP T-Online then told the prosecutor whom the IP address had been assigned to.

The T-Online case raised voices pointing out that German law also bans web site providers such as Heise, Amazon and Ebay from logging the IP addresses of their users. At present such logging is widespread, partly because US designed software (including open source software) does not take data protection requirements into account. Data protection expert Patrick Breyer called for a law mandating commercial software for sale in Europe to be provided with a standard configuration that conforms to European data protection requirements.

Ruling of the District Court of Darmstadt on IP logging (in German only)
http://www.olnhausen.com/law/olg/lgda-verbindungsdaten.html

Model complaint against logs retention (in German only)
http://www.daten-speicherung.de/wiki/index.php/Musterklage

(Contribution by Patrick Breyer - Working Group on Data Retention - Germany)