Don't get me wrong, but easyDNS may be jumping hastily to conclusions. In many countries, soliciting business there makes you subject to its jurisdiction and laws, regardless of where your business is based.
I don't know German law, but I hope that easyDNS consulted their own attorneys on the subject before publishing this post, or they could potentially end up quite embarrassed.
Without any presence in foreign countries, the most the foreign country can do is block the offending website or infrastructure provider. I guess they could also request extradition, but most countries only extradite citizens if what they did was also illegal in the home country.
Enforcement is, of course, a separate matter. The country may not be able to reach you without some sort of agreement with your home country; but if you ever visit a country with which it does have an agreement, you could find yourself taken away to answer to the law.
Well, yes, kinda. But the Saudis will not be successful in extraditing you, most likely. However they can still block your services, and Allah help you if you decide to travel there after you've been found guilty of violating their laws.
Then again, not as bad as the US is on and about... Just ask Mr Dotcom...
Assange and Wikileaks is similar - Assange is an Australian citizen in the UK, but is being extradited to the US for breaking US law via a website. He is not being charged with any offences (to do with this) in either the UK or Australia.
If your website blasphemes and can be reached from Saudi, then the relevant authorities there could push for you to be extradited to face charges in Saudi (if your country and Saudi have an extradition treaty). It doesn't happen, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.
1) We do not advertise in Germany.
2) Our client is not German.
I came here with the same thought, assuming that your client was German. But it seems you are just a third party, and good luck to them.
It appears that you do act as a registrar for .DE domains. At least, entering "ascascdasdcascascascasdcasdc.de" on the search on the front page at https://easydns.com/ offers to register it for me. It's purely a guess on my part, but I'd expect that most people who purchase .DE domains are in Germany, so if you've actually sold a few .DE domains you probably have some German customers.
That might not be enough to open you up to having to worry about German law...but it is enough that I would not dismiss that possibility out of hand.
PS: your site seems partly broken. I first tried to check for .DE on this page: https://easydns.com/domains/register/
Entering "ascascdasdcascascascasdcasdc.de" on the search there does nothing for me in Firefox. I had uBlock Origin on, so turned it off. Still nothing. Then I switched to Chrome, using a profile with no relevant extensions, and still nothing.
So instead I just went to the list below that lists all the TLDs you handle, and went through to find DE. That has a "Special Requirements" link, which doesn't do anything for me in either Firefox or Chrome.
PPS: in Firefox's console, it shows these messages for that page that isn't working right:
'Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://matomo.int.easydns.net/piwik.js”." at register:1:1
'unreachable code after return statement' at signup.js:15:1
To me this looks like German law definitely applies to them.
Most companies offering .de domains do so as resellers, they don't need to be members of DENIC. Also, .de domains can be owned by people and entities outside of Germany, but require either the domain owner or the adminc to be in Germany. Most international registrars offer a service to provide a local adminc.
We comply with the laws of the country in which we are domiciled, which is Canada.
According to DENIC's TOS, the domain owner doesn't have to be German (as long as they appoint a Germany-based representative for receiving correspondence official and court correspondence, but that's not easyDNS' concern).
¹ some just want some domain hack that ends in "de". I have a .es domain, despite having no intention of targeting the Spanish market, just because the name of the site ended in "es".
It’s quite hard to argue they’re not catering for the German market if they sell a product with 93% German customers, specific for the German market.
My understanding is making the website available to a country can be soliciting business.
> And how, in practice, could they enforce that if this canadian entity has not broken any canadian law and canada as such has no impetus to enforce german law?
Don't they have deals for such thing? I remember reading that a British court judgement for damages could be enforced in the US.
Oh dear, that would make publishing any website extremely dangerous..
Many countries have signed treaties that provide for enforcement process for judgments rendered in another signatory. It's in the spirit of reciprocity. If Canada wants to be able to reach a German national, Germany will insist on a reciprocal arrangement to reach a Canadian national. (I don't know whether they have such an agreement, but such agreements are common.)
Contrary to what a lot of HNers may believe, judicial and procedural boundaries aren't necessarily coextensive with national borders.
There are criminal copyright infringement laws in both countries... But the lawyers here cannot actually force the German state prosecute anyway, and it seems they did not file a criminal complaint anyway, and even if they did the prosecutors' office would most likely deny prosecution against EasyDNS since they are only a service provider and not a direct party to the alleged infringement. The prosecutors' office would probably even deny a prosecution against the actual perpetrator because it's just about a single image and thus a minor infraction. So right now it's just a civil matter.
But in fact companies like Amazon have customised sites, T&Cs, and procedures for every country they operate in because they have to comply with many different legal systems.
But that does not mean that operating a business on the web in a single country makes you liable throughout the world. That being said, accepting a foreign customer might make you liable to the law of that customer's country.
As a practical matter seems unlikely that this particular law firm is going to go to the mat in terms of any possible enforcement action (and that assumes it can even be done or attempted by teaming up with a firm in Canada (where easydns is from what I am reading).
Very generally also I don't think it's a good idea for a company (and in particular a small company) to air publicly something like this. It leaks details on how they act and what they will do that could be used against them by another company in the future. In otherwise the publicity could end up being counterproductive.
That line of reasoning always sounded tautological to me. "Law X from country A says that by doing Y you are under jurisdiction of country A", but for "law X from country A" to apply to you, don't you have to already be under jurisdiction of country A in the first place?
No.
(Random terminological observation deleted.)
Why are we picking nits over this?
Perhaps random terminological observations annoy people? I'll delete that part.