Germans are mostly chill but if you start torrenting copyrighed content or even watching illegal streaming they will eat your face and drink your warm blood.
German Wikipedia was taken down twice (for "privacy", not piracy though). Still "illegal information". In the latter case about a former Stasi worker turned leftist member of parliament.
The German Wikipedia site was taken down by court order this week because it mentioned the full name of a deceased Chaos Computer Club hacker, known as Tron. A Berlin court ordered the closure of the site on Tuesday after it sided with the parents of the German hacker, who wanted to prevent the online encyclopedia from publishing the real name of their son. A final ruling is expected in two weeks' time.
By virtue of an interim injunction ordered by the Lübeck state court dated November 13, 2008, upon the request of Lutz Heilmann (Member of Parliament – “Die Linke” party), Wikipedia Germany is hereby enjoined from continuing linking from the Internet address wikipedia.de to the Internet address de.wikipedia.org, as long as under the address de.wikipedia.org certain propositions concerning Lutz Heilmann remain visible.
You may know about Rote Armee Fraktion/Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe. They were a self-proclaimed communist and anti-imperialist urban guerrilla group. They murdered 34 people. A number of these were former Nazi party members that in the 1970s had climbed to powerful positions in West Germany. OTOH, during the war nazi party membership was not exactly optional if you ran a business.
On the other side of the border: While Angela Merkel denies it, I find it extremely improbable that she did not work for Stasi in some form.
the problem is people don't know about torrents, and many streaming sites are based on torrents, so they re-upload the stream while you're watching, which gets you into trouble
For a lot of Germans who are knowledgable in this topic, being associated with such a company is nearly like openly admitting to have raped children. The hate for these law firms and their employees is extreme.
Just for anyone new here, if you have comments like this, please be specific and post something a neutral person can verify and form their own opinion on. Don't just post silly one-liners that don't have any real content.
I'll also take the bait. As far as I understand it, these rules come, fundamentally, from the German Basic Law which was drafted, in part, with direct support from the US after the war. There's certainly always room for healthy debate about what is meant by freedom of speech. But it strikes me as ignorant to come from a US "absolutist" perspective and not understand the history (of US involvement). No clue if the poster is approaching it from that perspective; I'm trying to raise the point of historical context in response to the category of such responses I've encountered.
tl;dr Since in Germany it is illegal to e.g. make public postings calling for the rape of women or share video footage of women being murdered and tortured for the purpose of entertainment and gloating, one day ahead of International Womens Day police staged a big showy series of raids on individuals doing such things, to make a point and call attention to the issue.
Sounds like an excellent use of my tax money, to be honest, but it was certainly controversial also in Germany.
This article doesn't report the facts correctly; the search warrant was issued for posting an anti-semitic Nazi meme.
(Just for the record, I believe that a well-known politician should just have to live with being insulted.)
> The Bavaria resident is also accused of posting Nazi-era imagery and language earlier in 2024. According to prosecutors, this post may have violated German laws against the incitement of ethnic or religious hatred.
> The man was arrested on Thursday as part of nationwide police operations against suspected antisemitic hate speech online.
> The public prosecutor's office in Bamberg has now announced: The search had already been requested before the Green politician himself filed a criminal complaint in the case.
> Habeck only filed a criminal complaint in the case more than a month after the search warrant had been requested.
> According to the public prosecutor's office, the suspect is also facing another charge: According to this, in spring 2024, he allegedly uploaded a picture on X with a reference to the Nazi dictatorship, which could potentially constitute the criminal offense of incitement to hatred. According to the investigators, it shows an SS or SA man with the poster and the words “Germans don't buy from Jews” and the additional text “True democrats! We've had it all before!”.
Hrmmm, German supports using the monopoly on violence given to the state to make raids on people who make undesirable social media posts.
There’s only one problem. Whos to say you won’t be the next target if the political climate shifts to cracking down on pro-censorship voices like yourself?
Will you think its still a good use of your tax money when the opposition is putting you in a police car for this exact HN comment?
> German supports using the monopoly on violence given to the state to make raids on people who make undesirable social media posts.
Yes. As a sibling poster mentioned, this has historical roots. German law recognizes something called "Volksverhetzung", similar to concepts in other national criminal codes in other countries:
You can probably guess which hot button issue it comes up with in context the most often (if not: Holocaust denial).
Essentially, there was a landmark judgement that certain forms of calling for violence against women publicly can qualify as this, and so may potentially be criminal (this would be decided case by case in an actual trial, of course).
I can completely understand coming from the perspective of the First Amendment US system and having a different opinion on this. As a crude analogy, it's a bit like Americans love their free market while Europeans usually think a bit more regulation of capitalism is a sane thing to do. It's going to be difficult to agree across the pond.
These things exist on a gradient. Note that plenty of other intact democracies are much stricter than Germany, e.g. South Korea where legal action against online hate speech occurs at a far larger volume, and comes together with far more tracking infrastructure and lack of anonymity on the internet (e.g. since everyone has a client cert for online commerce). And you know what? Many South Koreans want internet hate speech and trolling and bullying policed even much harder.
In Germany there is constant, sometimes quite heated debate on the reach of the application of the Volksverhetzung idea. I think that's very good and have had different opinions across various cases.
> Will you think its still a good use of your tax money when the opposition is putting you in a police car for this exact HN comment?
I know the legislative and political processes of my country well enough to know the long process it would take to get there. If I see things slide in the wrong direction, you bet I'll vote or take to the streets on that issue, too.
A country is a process that takes active participation. It's not a black or white thing you settle one time.
> The offence means that in certain cases, criticism of the government that constitutes insult or defamation against political figures is subject to criminal prosecution in Germany.
> Specifically, Section 188 was amended by law, adding "insult" to the offence in addition to "defamation" and "slander". The offence was also extended to include local politicians.
> Robert Habeck of the Greens, for example, filed 805 criminal complaints. The Greens' Annalena Baerbock filed 513, Marco Buschmann of the FDP 26, and Boris Pistorius of the SPD 10, among others.
> Politicians from other parties such as the CDU and AfD have also filed criminal complaints against insults from citizens.
> This includes AfD leader Alice Weidel, who has filed hundreds of complaints for insults online and has also made use of Section 188, even though her party is in favour of abolishing it.
> CDU leader Friedrich Merz, before he became chancellor, had also filed several criminal complaints for insulting behaviour, which in some cases led to house searches.
I think the insult prosecution goes in most cases too far. For me the difference is that Volksverhetzung targets entire groups and raises sentiment against them, while these insults are individual, and public persons are already special-cased in some other ways. I also think the people pressing charges are usually doing themselves no favors, when this is covered in the press they usually end up looking like power-abusing bullies.
> It made the country so rich that they stopped caring about other stuff, they could just buy them from elsewhere. So there was little incentive to manufacture first, and industrialize later.
Transcontinental fleet of ships regularly circumventing the globe and transporting cargo requires lots of technology. Why marine industry didn't stimulate manufacturing and industrialization?
> As individuals realize that nakedly appeasing the autocrat wins favor, they voluntarily corrupt themselves and others in hopes of advantage.
> displaced by a hierarchy of criminals or warlords
The problem is that initially it all looks straightforward and easy. Revealing even, because finally solution is not that complicated anymore. Only afterwards things turn unpredictable and violent, but then it's already irreversible.
Nowadays you cannot even digitally transfer 15k EUR from your own bank account to your own brokerage without answering invasive questions, 15k EUR which had been taxed at least once already. Oligarchs, dictators, high figure politicians, and white collar criminals don't seem to have problems with money transfers though.
It's slop all the way down. If it's not AI slop it's human slop. If you have a LinkedIn account you must fill it with a constant stream of something. Way too many meaningless middle managers won't hire you if your LinkedIn profile doesn't have enough shit in it.
You shouldn't work for those asswipes but a job is a job, so the slop must flow
> slop. If you have a LinkedIn account you must fill it with a constant stream of something
This is 100% baloney. Almost none of the people I work with are heavy LinkedIn posters, and I’ve never met a hiring manager who cared what your LinkedIn feed looked like. This has held true across startups, FAANGs, and mid cap tech companies.
Everytime I watch these private jets and helicopters I wonder why flying economy class has to be so miserable in terms of horizontal, vertical, and leg space.
Hollywood and media publishers run entire franchises of legal bullies across developed world to harass individuals, and lobby for laws allowing easy prosecution of ISP contract owner. Even Google Books was castrated because of IP rights. Now I have hard time to imagine how this IP+AI cartel operates. Nowadays everyone and their cat throws millions on AI so I imagine IP owners get their share.
In Europe these cost 5k EUR. I guess I'm not buying computer ever again and hopefully the 10 years old ones I have will never die.
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