15 Sep 14 | Germany, Mapping Media Freedom, News and features, Politics and Society
Vandals attacked the Lausitzer Rundschaufor the second time in a week.
On the night of September 4-5, the daily newspaper Lausitzer Rundschau became victim to a crime by now familiar to its employees: neo-nazis vandalised the outside of one of its office buildings in the eastern German city of Spremberg, covering it with anti-Semitic graffiti. Less than a week later, on the night of September 8-9, another Lausitzer Rundschau office in the nearby city of Lübbenau faced a similar attack.
The incidents were covered by national and local media in Brandenburg, the state surrounding Berlin. Right-wing extremism has been a sensitive topic for the Lausitzer Rundschau—only two years ago, the newspaper’s Spremberg office was also vandalized by neo-Nazis who left graffiti and an animal carcass outside the building. Shortly before the 2012 attack, the newspaper had reported critically about a right-wing extremist march in Spremberg.
Klaus Minhardt, president of the German Journalists’ Association’s local Berlin-Brandenburg chapter, sees offences like the ones against Lausitzer Rundschau as motivated by a small group of individuals lashing out against specific media reports.
“People like to make journalists their victims and to take revenge out on them. Usually, somebody does something bad and the journalist who uncovers that becomes the face of the issue,” Minhardt said.
A few days before the September 4 attack, Lausitzer Rundschau ran a report on a trial in the nearby city of Cottbus, where police testified that right-wing extremist paraphernalia was found on an alleged assailant’s body. Johannes M. Fischer, editor in chief of Lausitzer Rundschau, says the newspaper’s reporting on the trial is one reason for the recent vandalism. Another, says Fischer, is the upcoming Brandenburg state elections on September 14. Election posters in the area surrounding Lausitzer Rundschau’s offices were also covered in anti-Semitic graffiti after both of the new incidents.
This past week’s attacks on the newspaper were shocking because they were repeated in quick succession. According to Fischer, the kind of vandalisation was also more brutal than the previous incident in 2012.
“The quality is different. It has a horrible quality. The sayings are more violent. ‘Jews, Jews out, gas Jews,’ which was abbreviated as VE.G.,” Fischer said.
Because of the proximity between the two offices in Lübbenau and Spremberg, police have said that the same people are likely responsible for both of the September attacks on Lausitzer Rundschau. Fischer is also convinced that a only a few dozen people are behind the vandalisation, and he stresses that the Lausitz region is tolerant, while locals have expressed support for the newspaper after the attacks.
Lausitzer Rundschau has become well known for its aggressive reporting on neo-nazi activity in the region, which covers parts of the eastern German states of Brandenburg and Saxony. In 2013, two of the newspaper’s reporters won national prizes for their work on right-wing extremists in the area.
The “tough staff,” Fischer says, is not intimidated by the attacks on their offices and is determined to continue covering neo-nazi groups there. Fischer still refers to the vandalisation as a threat, and says he has offered reporters various options if they feel uncomfortable working after the attacks.
“They could switch to a different beat. And we also said, ‘You don’t have to write about this topic,’” Fischer said.
None of the Lausitzer Rundschau journalists took Fischer up on that offer. He adds, “They say, ‘Now we really have to do this.’”
More reports from Germany via mediafreedom.ushahidi.com:
Deutsche Welle accused of censorship
Public broadcaster fires blogger
Photographer arrested at protest
ECHR rules court decision to stop publication about Chancellor Schröder was illegal
Head of state chancellery intimidates journalists with legal warning
This article was published on Monday Sept 15, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
11 Jul 14 | Germany, Mapping Media Freedom, News and features
A local newspaper in the western German city of Darmstadt is at the centre of a legal case that will measure whether readers’ comments are protected by Germany’s press freedom laws.
On June 24, police and the Darmstadt public prosecutor arrived with a search warrant at the offices of the newspaper Echo. A complaint had been filed over a 2013 reader comment on Echo’s website. Months later, a local court issued a search warrant to force the newspaper to hand over the commenter’s user data.
The comment, which was left under the username “Tinker” on an article about construction work in a town near Darmstadt, questioned the intelligence of two public officials there. Within hours, Echo had removed the comment from its website after finding that it did not comply with its policy for reader comments. According to a statement Echo released after the June confrontation with police, the two town administrators named in the comment had filed the complaint, alleging that it was insulting. This January, Darmstadt police sent the newspaper a written request for the commenter’s user data. Echo declined.
When police showed up at Echo’s offices five months after their initial request for the commenter’s identity, the newspaper’s publisher gave them the user data, preventing a search of Echo’s offices. A representative for the Darmstadt public prosecutor later defended the warrant.
“It’s our opinion that the comment does not fall under press freedom because we assume that the editorial staff doesn’t edit the comments,” Noah Krüger, a representative for the Darmstadt public prosecutor, told Echo.
According to Hannes Fischer, a spokesperson for Echo, the newspaper is preparing legal action against the search warrant.
“We see this as a clear intervention in press freedom,” Fischer said. “Comments are part of editorial content because we use them for reporting – to see what people are saying. So we see every comment on our website as clearly part of our editorial content, and they therefore are to be protected as sources.”
In early 2013, a search warrant was used against the southern German newspaper Die Augsburger Allgemeine to retrieve user data for a commenter on the newspaper’s website. In that case, a local public official had also filed a complaint over a comment he found insulting. The newspaper appealed the case and an Augsburg court ruled that the search warrant was illegal. The court rejected the official’s complaint that the comment was insulting, but also ruled against Die Augsburger Allgemeine’s claim that user comments are protected under press freedom laws.
In Echo’s case, the commenter’s freedom of speech will likely be considered in determining whether the comment was insulting. If convicted of insult, the commenter could face a fine or prison sentence of up to one year. Given the precedent from the 2013 case and the public prosecutor’s response, it’s unclear whether press freedom laws may be considered against the search warrant. Ulrich Janßen, president of the German Journalists’ Union (dju), agreed that user comments should be protected by press freedom laws. “If the editors removed the comment, then that’s a form of editing. That speaks against the argument that comments are not editorial content,” Janßen said. Warning that the search warrant against Echo may lead to intimidation of media, Janßen cautioned, “Self-censorship could result when state authorities don’t respect press freedom of editorial content.”
Recent reports from Germany via mediafreedom.ushahidi.com:
Court rules 2011 confiscation of podcasters’ equipment was illegal
New publisher of tabloid to lay off three quarters of employees
Police use search warrant against newspaper to obtain website commenter’s data
Blogger covering court case faced with interim injunction
Competing local newspapers share content, threatening press diversity
Transparency platform wins court case against Ministry of the Interior
This article was posted on July 11, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
06 Mar 14 | Digital Freedom, Germany, News and features, Young Writers / Artists Programme
Photo illustration: Shutterstock
In February, thousands of websites urged their users to help stop web monitoring. The Day We Fight Back, led by American lobby group Demand Progress, condemned NSA Internet surveillance and remembered Aaron Swartz, opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), who hanged himself last year when faced with fifty years in prison for downloading academic texts. Swartz, from whom courts sought $1m in fines, is synonymous today with US clashes over online justice, but the subject is a global one. Germany, where I moved just before SOPA hit the news, offers a frightening glimpse at what happens when copyright policing trumps privacy.
I moved to Berlin in September 2011, as the German Pirate Party won its way into the city state’s assembly. Papers bewildered by this breakthrough named the party, all of whose candidates gained seats, the new rebels in national politics, noting their platform reached young, deprived and disaffected voters. I spent October in a part of town with plenty, renting a cupboardlike room while seeking somewhere longer term. The other tenants, a Barcelonian tour guide and science student from Berlin subletting empty space for cash, already knew each other. Nocturnal, inconsiderate and antisocial, the new kid scared of trying to make friends, I wasn’t a good flatmate, and left amid severe awkwardness.
At my new address, the scientist – passive-aggressively polite – told me I had to sign a retroactive rental contract. This could easily have been done by email — when he asked to meet, I should have smelled a rat, but obliged outside a supermarket in November, not stopping to wonder why both ex-flatmates turned up. “While you were here,” he said once papers were filled out, “you used BitTorrent?”
I had, I said, like almost all my friends. Filesharing was in my eyes like speeding on the motorway, an illegality most practised and few cared about. “We all do it”, the Barcelonian said, who seemed to have come reluctantly.
The scientist produced a further wad of fine-print forms. “We got sued”, he told me, “by the music industry.”
This wasn’t quite true. The document he held was an Abmahnung, a razor-edged cease-and-desist letter of German law, which lets lawyers bill recipients for time spent drafting them. The aim is to curb legal costs for poorer plaintiffs, but since other laws allow solicitors to act without instruction, firms monitor the web (often via private companies), posting them en masse to copyright infringers as a profit-making scheme; 500,000 people, reports claim, receive them yearly. Whoever issued one to my flat sought money for themselves – rights holders almost certainly weren’t briefing them.
I didn’t know any of this back then. In England, where no such business model thrives, being caught filesharing was unheard of. When I moved there, I had no idea of the German situation, and wasn’t ready for the consequences. Ambushed by ex-flatmates, intimidated and off-balance, I didn’t just sign forms admitting I’d downloaded one major artist’s album – I signed others the scientist handed me stating I’d bootlegged files I hadn’t. These accounted for nine tenths of what I later had to pay — at current exchange rates, close to £2000.
The film and record the forms named, presumably, were torrented by someone else in the flat. I’d never heard of them, and with ten minutes to think straight would have realised that – but thinking straight when bombshells land, not least while scanning foreign legalese, is difficult. Half on autopilot, half assuming I knew them by other names, I signed the papers in the bedlam of the moment. “Um ehrlich zu sein”, the scientist said once I realised my mistake, “glaube ich dir nicht.” To be honest, I don’t believe you.
If I didn’t pay the four figure sum the Abmahnung called for, the firm behind it would file suit – in which case, he said, he’d forward them what I signed and I should find a lawyer. Had I hired one, I might have been cleared or at least fined less. Specialists can haggle numbers down – typically, says Cologne solicitor Christian Solmecke, “by about half”. The trouble, which led me to pay up, was that this wouldn’t be much better.
Abmahnung victims, the Pirate Party states, are often “seriously intimidated”. A court case at the best of times is hard — this was my year out as a language student, my German was nowhere near strong enough, and the thought terrified me. Inflated study grants for life abroad arrived, by chance, just as the crisis hit, and my finances were fortunately healthy even after paying out, but a lawyer wouldn’t have been cheap. Solmecke’s firm charges €400-500 to represent its clients (£300-413), seemingly a mainstream rate, and legal bills stack up.
Not all those affected are BitTorrent users. Hamburg resident Karin Gross was charged €300 when an Abmahnung alleged she’s downloaded an obscure illegal media program which bore all the marks of infectious malware; firms like Kiel lawyer Lutz Schroeder’s make thousands threatening those in her position. “You either get ripped off by some lawyer sending you an Abmahnung”, she told the press, “or you have to hire another lawyer who costs just as much.”
Others pay for honest oversights. Pensioners Lydia and Heinz Paffrath, who sold their grandchildren’s old toys for them on eBay, were charged over €650 when they accidentally advertised a doll’s wardrobe under the wrong brand name. Canadian exchange student Nina Arbabzadeh, visiting Berlin in 2012, was billed €1200 for downloading Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, which neither she nor her flatmate had done. A visitor who had, they guessed, had used their wireless with torrent software left on.
It’s true, I torrented a handful of things, in one case getting caught, and that most Abmahnungen go to users who do. Does this justify the fines at hand – more, I noted then, then you’d get for vandalising Berlin’s city trains, and far more than for shoplifting DVDs? I haven’t touched illegal downloads since, and my web use now is hemmed in by a mesh of proxy servers and precautions. Even having sworn off BitTorrent, I’m anxious, second-guessing every click and panicking at German-language post (last month, when an official looking envelope came for my flatmate, I Google-searched advice for half an hour — it turned out she had unpaid speeding tickets.)
“If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”, the snooper’s mantra goes, but it’s more and more impossible to know what will and won’t be punished.
Last July, a Hamburg court capped sums ordered of downloaders at €150, a measure lauded by the press and praised by local activist Anneke Voss as curbing “the Abmahnung industry’s shameless excesses”. The federal Law Against Dubious Business Practices followed in October, applying an admittedly less helpful €1000 limit nationwide. It didn’t stop the biggest wave of Abmahnungen in history, more than 30,000 people getting them in one December week who’d visited RedTube.com, an adult site whose pornographic clips – some, under copyright, uploaded by third parties – are streamed like YouTube videos.
This isn’t even filesharing — users are made to pay up or face a legal fight simply for viewing web pages. It doesn’t matter that the case against them is a flimsy one. Costs plunge many in to crisis even if they win. Torrenters may not be protected either, as the new law waives its cap on fines “if the stated value [lost to rights holders], according to the individual case’s own circumstances, is considerable”. No one knows yet what this means in practice – a lengthy period of wrangling is expected to ensue – but vested interests will no doubt defend their moneymaking prospects.
British and US laws give firms less room to act like this, but it’s clear to those who care that Germany’s status quo is less a triumph of fair play or honesty than a toxic cocktail of profiteering and surveillance. It’s easy to see, post-Swartz and post-Wikileaks, how the assault on piracy might lead down such a road.
If it does, the world will be dragged with it. SOPA, which threatened the wholesale existence of media platforms like YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo, was meant to take worldwide effect. Officials opted to “postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement”, shelving rather than scrapping the proposals. The act, or the prospect of one like it, still hangs over us. Even that may not be needed. In David Cameron’s Britain, where service providers were ordered last year to block video-sharing sites, the Big Society ideals of web-policing and privatised justice could produce a German style free-for-all if left to run their course.
The internet was made for instant data replication – in other words, for filesharing. Copyright laws weren’t passed with it in mind. On social media this week, you’ve likely witnessed dozens of infringements – photos, gifs, videos, quotations. Clampdowns on piracy, as the German system demonstrates, attack the core idea of the net, scapegoating users for new technology’s inescapable impact. Rights protection has its place, but must be reformed.
This article was posted on March 6, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
21 Aug 13 | Digital Freedom, Germany, Index Reports, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
The situation with regards to freedom of expression in Germany is largely positive. Freedom of expression is protected by the German Constitution and basic laws. There is room for improvement, with Germany’s hate speech and libel laws being particularly severe.
Germany’s biggest limits on freedom of expression are due to its strict hate speech legislation which criminalises incitement to violence or hatred. Germany has particularly strict laws on the promotion or glorification of Nazism, or Holocaust denial with paragraph 130(3) of the German Criminal Code stipulating that those who ‘publicly or in an assembly approve, deny, or trivialise’ the Holocaust are liable to up to five years in prison or a monetary fine. Hate speech also extends to insulting segments of the population or a national, racial or religious group, or one characterised by its ethnic customs.
Germany still has strict provisions in the criminal code providing penalties for defamation of the President, insulting the Federal Republic, its states, the flag, and the national anthem. However, in 2000, the Federal Constitutional Court stated that even harsh political criticism, however unjust, does not constitute insulting the Republic. The criminal code however remains in place.
Freedom of religious expression is compromised through anti-blasphemy laws criminalising ‘offences related to religion and ideology’. Paragraph 166 of the Criminal Code prohibits defamation against ‘a church or other religious or ideological association within Germany, or their institutions or customs’. While very few people (just 10) have been convicted under the blasphemy legislation since 1969, the impact of hate speech legislation is seen more frequently, in particular in the prosecution of religious offences. In 2006, a pensioner in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia was given a 1-year suspended sentence for printing ‘The Koran, the Holy Koran’ on toilet paper, and sending it to 22 Mosques and Muslim community centres. In 2011, nine of the 18 operators of the far right online radio programme ‘Resistance Radio’ were given between 21 months and three years in prison for inciting hatred.
Germany has also seen heated debate over a widespread ban on religious symbols in public workplaces, especially affecting Muslim women who wear headscarves, which limits, as a result, freedom of religious expression. Half of Germany’s 16 states have, to various extents, banned teachers and civil servants from wearing religious symbols at work. Yet this is not applied equally to all religions, five states have made exceptions for Christian religious symbols.
Media freedom
Government and political interference in the media sector continues to raise concerns for media independence, with several incidents of interventions by politicians attempting to influence editorial policy. In 2009, chief editor of public service broadcaster ZDF, Nikolaus Brender saw his contract terminated by a board featuring several politicians from the ruling Christian Democratic Union. Reporters Without Borders labelled it a ‘blatant violation of the principle of independence of public broadcasters.’ In 2011, the editor of Bild, the country’s biggest newspaper, received a voicemail message from President Christian Wulff, who threatened ‘war’ on the tabloid which reported on unusual personal loan he received.
Media plurality is strong among regional newspapers though due to financial pressure, media plurality declined in 2009 and 2010. Germany has one of the most concentrated TV markets in Europe, with 82% of total TV advertising spend shared among just 2 main TV stations in Germany. This gives a significant amount of influence to just 2 broadcasters and the majority of Germans still receive their daily news from the television.
The legal framework for the media is generally positive with accessible public interest defences for journalists in the law of privacy and defamation. However, Germany still has criminal provisions in its defamation law, which although unused, remain in the penal code. Germany’s civil defamation law is medium to low cost in comparison with other European jurisdictions, places the burden of proof on the claimant (a protection to freedom of expression) and contains a responsible journalism defence, although not a broader public interest defence.
Digital
The digital sphere in Germany has remained relatively free with judicial oversight over content takedown, protections for online privacy and a high level of internet penetration (83% of Germans are online). Germany’s Federal Court of Justice has ruled that access to the internet is a basic right in modern society. Section 184b of the German Penal Code ‘states that it is a criminal offense to disseminate, publicly display, present or otherwise make accessible any pornographic material showing sexual activities performed by, on or in the presence of a child.’ Germany has also ratified and put into the law the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cyber Crimes from 2001. Mobile operators also signed up to a Code of Conduct in 2005, which includes a commitment to a dual system of identification and authentication to protect children from harmful content. This was reaffirmed and made binding in 2007.
There are concerns over the increased use of surveillance of online communications, especially since a new antiterrorism law took effect in 2009.
In 2011, German authorities acquired the license for a type of spyware called FinSpy, produced by the British Gamma Group. This spyware can bypass anti-virus software and can extract data from the device it is targeting. Two reports by the German Parliamentary Control Panel, from 2009 and 2010, stated that several German intelligence units had monitored emails with the amount of surveillance increasing from 7 million pieces items in 2009 to 37 million in 2010. However, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled in February that intelligence agencies are only allowed to collect data secretly from suspects’ computers if there is evidence that human lives or state property are in danger and the authorities must get a court order before they secretly upload spyware to a suspect’s computer.
Germany’s tough hate speech legislation also chills free speech online. In January 2012, Twitter adopted a new global policy allowing the company to delete tweets if countries request it, meaning that tweets become subject to Germany’s hate speech laws. The latest Twitter transparency report states that German government agencies asked for just 2 items to be removed. In October 2012, Twitter also blocked the account of a far-right German group, Better Hannover, after a police investigation.
Artistic freedom
Artists can work relatively freely in Germany. Freedom of expression in arts is protected under the Constitution, and is largely respected, especially for satire or comedy. Yet, the freedom of expression of artists is chilled through strict hate speech and blasphemy laws.
The German authorities very rarely use blasphemy laws against artists[xiv]. However, there have been several examples of art being subjected to censorship due to religious offence. In 2012, at the exhibition ‘Caricatura VI – The Comic Art – analog, digital, international’ in Kassel, a cartoon created by cartoonist Mario Lars was removed after protests that it offended religious sensibilities.
There is persistent sensitivity around artistic works depicting the Nazi period. In April 2013, the German version of an Icelandic author’s book was ‘censored’ by its publisher, who cut 30 chapters from Hallgrímur Helga’s novel, ‘The woman at 1000°’. Key passages about Hitler, concentration camps and SS were censored to fit the German market.
