Hello Sebastian, Am 22.10.22 um 23:55 schrieb Sebastian Nielsen via mailop:
Germany and Sweden do not. And only paid online services require a imprint, free OR personal online services do not in germany.
I think that is too much of a generalisation. German law mandates that an imprint is provided for a service that is "geschäftsmässig", which the dictionary translates as business-like. Courts have upheld that even placing an ad banner on your website constitutes Geschäftsmässigkeit, regardless if you collect money for your service or not. A rather fine example has been the Landgericht Essen in Az 4 0 256/11, which upheld that mentioning a literature suggestion, while not even naming book or author, invites the visitor to come back later and thus helps further the sale of said book.
As not having an imprint when being required to used to open one up for costly cease and desist, in most cases the recommendation was to put an imprint online, to be on the safe side. German courts, by the way, consider websites in german language geared towards a german audience, and thus construct the imprint need for foreign companies as well (cf. LG Frankfurt a.M.., ruling from 28.03.2003 – Az. 3-12 O 151/02, KG Berlin ruling from 08.04.2016 (Az. 5 U 156/14)).
The imprint requirement for commercial entities should be applicable in the entire European Union, according to art. 5 paragraph 1 of the E-Commerce Directive (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32000L0031). The "usual suspects" comply (eg. https://www.google.de/contact/impressum.html)
Best regards Johannes _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
