According to heise.de the Landesgericht Hamburg has now ruled, that board operators are responsible for what members of these baords post. Previously they were only required to remove illegal content if they notice it and don’t have to actively search for it.
Especially interesting is following quote:
"Wenn die Zahl der Foren und die Zahl der Einträge so groß ist, dass die Antragsgegnerin nicht über genügend Personal oder genügend technische Mittel verfügt, um diese Einträge vor ihrer Freischaltung einer Prüfung auf ihre Rechtmäßigkeit zu unterziehen, dann muss sie entweder ihre Mittel vergrößern oder den Umfang ihres Betriebs [ ...] beschränken" Quote of the Landesgericht by Heise.de
Translated this basically means, that if moderating users’ posts before making them publically available is not possible with the current personal or methods then the operator has to hire more personal/add new methods to moderate the content or reduce the size of the service.
It’s currently not clear if this ruling really applied to every bulletin board in Germany, but even if not, the whole idea is in my opinion crazy. Just think about a community as large as gaiaonline.com with more than 3,600,000 registered users and half a billion posts. Moderate this in advance ;) Thank you, dear judges, for virtually killing bulletin boards in Germany.
… Sometimes I’ve really glad, that I don’t live in Germany …
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