'Revenge porn' victims receive boost from German court ruling

[suwiel]

Koblenz court orders man to delete nude images of ex-partner, even though he had shown no intention of publishing them
Philip Oltermann in Berlin, Thursday 22 May 2014 14.14 EDTIntimate photographs should be deleted at the end of a relationship if one of the partners calls for it, a court in Germany has ruled

Comments

[lied_ohne_worte]

It's a good thing indeed, but one should note (and the article makes it sound a bit misleading) that German law doesn't operate by "precedent" as much as countries like the UK and US (something to do with the difference between common and civil law). Having a previous court decision to support one can definitely be helpful, but if the facts in another case are somewhat different, another court may well come to the opposite conclusion in another case, if there is a way to interpret existing laws differently.

The problem right now is that most of the laws we have come from a pre-digital world, which means that courts have to become quite creative in applying them to conditions they really weren't made for. That leads to considerable insecurity on a number of issues, particularly having to do with intellectual property or privacy, the case in question really coming down to a mixture of both. If one tries to find out, for instance, under which conditions one may make a security copy of one's legally owned CD's in Germany, the internet provides an astounding selection of answers, including some that directly contradict each other.

While this decision is a good thing, what we really need are proper laws. But seeing as our Chancellor declared last year that the internet is "Neuland" - meaning approximately "virgin soil" - which makes it sound as if she had only become aware of its existence quite recently, I'm sure we have some time to wait for those.