The first-instance district court of Hamburg has ruled that the online news site Heise can be held liable for readers comments and "has had issued a temporary restraining order preventing heise online from publishing reader comments calling on others to overload a company's server by massively downloading a program."
The court said Heise should be liable for reader comments inciting destructive attacks online, whether they were aware of the specific comments or not. Heise had deleted the comments which has originally prompted the lawsuit but originally believed they only had to removed comments that they were aware of or had been notified of.
Heise apparently get about 200000 comments per month and software filters just aren't good enough to catch all the relevant subtleties (not to mention the false positive irritations they cause). Manual checking of that number of comments is not an option, so do Heise have to close down the commenting option? Well the German Supreme court ruled last year that sites like Heise could only be held liable if there were reasonable ways of reviewing the content third party contributors, so maybe not. The EU ecommerce directive of 2000 also says service providers don't have to comprehensively monitor comments they just transmit or store. So where does that leave Heise? Probably paying lawyers to test the limits of what the contradictions really mean.
No comments:
Post a Comment