Technology
Which posts fit here?
Anything that is at least tangentially connected to the technology, social media platforms, informational technologies and tech policy.
Post guidelines
[Opinion] prefix
Opinion (op-ed) articles must use [Opinion] prefix before the title.
Rules
1. English only
Title and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original link
Post URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communication
All communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. Inclusivity
Everyone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacks
Any kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangents
Stay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may apply
If something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.
Companion communities
!globalnews@lemmy.zip
!interestingshare@lemmy.zip
Icon attribution | Banner attribution
If someone is interested in moderating this community, message @brikox@lemmy.zip.
view the rest of the comments
The government is "social" democrats and "Christian" "democrats". Both are very tough on crime and very pro corporation.
There's a reason Germany has some of the most restrictive copyright law in the world. For example, only recently became making certain parodies legal due to a EU law forcing Germany to allow them.
Copyright infringement over here has the same exact punishment range as child kidnapping for non-monetary reasons.
There is a fee for anything that can cause copyright violations paid to copyright collectives including but not limited to storage mediums (CDs, flash drives, hard drives), electronic devices with said storage medium (mobile phones, computers) printers, scanners as well as yearly fees for having publicly accessible printers (for example, 190€ per printer in public libraries, 418€ per printer in universities/colleges) or general fees, like 17,222,621€ paid by the state for continuing the existence of libraries per year (in 2014, today probably significantly more).
Hardly anyone provides free WiFi because you can be sued for the copyright violations of your users. Or rather, you get a cease and desist with the demand to pay 1000€ in damages and if you don't then you will be sued and lose.
Emulators for modern video games are almost certainly illegal because all modern consoles include DRM you'd need to circumvent to get a game to run on the emulator. This means the development would already be illegal. There hasn't been any court case though because no emulation developer is based in Germany.
Only since a few years is publishing photos of the interior of your home if your wallpaper is copyrighted legal. Prior to that, you'd always lose if you were sued in Hamburg.
Hamburg has also ruled the website youtube-dl.org was illegal and that youtube-dl violates copyright. Sony and others successfully sued the hosting provider and were granted damages.
There's probably a million more things but copyright in Germany is generally fucked. There's no way any politician that has ever been in government will do anything that doesn't further strengthen copyright.