Hacker News Reader

Comment by Navarr | Hacker News Reader

What's the law they ran afoul of here?

I'm getting the impression from the Google Translate'd version of this[1] article, that they violated a contract with the company?

[1]: https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article232421961/OLG...

View on HN

If I understand correctly, the fine was imposed because Youtube failed to comply with the order of the court to make the video accessible again, which took them several weeks (20. April - 14. May 2020).

What confuses me is that the article states the video was removed in January, which would only make sense if it was January 2021, because January 2020 there were no restrictions in Switzerland. Maybe the above date should be May 2021.

I think the relevant piece from the Welt article is this:

> Es [the court] kam unter anderem zu dem Schluss, die geänderten Richtlinien seien nicht wirksam in den Vertrag mit dem Accountbetreiber einbezogen worden. Hierzu sei ein Änderungsvertrag erforderlich. Der bloße Hinweis, dass es künftig Änderungen geben könne, genüge nicht.

Roughly translated, the changed ToS of Youtube were not contractually effective, because the user was not asked to accept them. Stating that changes can happen any time is not enough.

Should be about something else than ToS, the quote is talking about a contract. The news is not sufficient to understand what supposedly happened there. That the Youtuber had a contract with Youtube, is that common? Maybe the court judged the partner program agreements as one?

That "future changes may apply without notice" is invalid in Germany, that's evident. Companies writing bullshit like that in AGBs (ToS) or contracts don't realize Germany is not the US, they need a new legal team.

If the news is correct you are right about the fine being about ignoring the court, not about removing the video in the first place. With a fine that high it has to be about that, there is no way removing a regular video could cause this. Basically the court saw youtube in contempt of the court, kinda.

Might also be politically charged though, East Germany is highly penetrated by Nazis and with a high percentage of corona deniers. Depends on the judge of course whether that was a factor here.

Yeah, it's pretty clear the fine is about not obeying the court.

But I was asking why the court was forcing them to re-instate a video in the first place.

Right, that part makes no sense at all to me. Even if the ToS did not include a fitting clause for the misinformation removal I see no binding right for the user to have his video hosted. That's why I added the tangent about the political environment in Dresden.

The ToS provide the binding right for the user to have the video hosted. It's in the name "terms of service": you follow the terms and in return you're provided with a service. In this case, the plaintiff complied with the terms but was denied service. The court didn't approve of that. I doubt it has anything to do with their political alignment.

You're probably right. I assumed that there is a clause in the AGB permitting Youtube to in general not host a video if they don't want to. Or that there is something creating a Hausrecht in there, given them the right to chose a customer. Doesn't seem to be the case.

> What's the law they ran afoul of here?

None. They violated their civil contract with the user AND failed to fix it within 3 months. cf. toplevel post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838603

It looks like the issue was the amount of time that Google took to comply. Per the article:

> “With the historically high fine, the Higher Regional Court makes it very clear that court decisions must be observed without restriction, regardless of whether YouTube assumes a violation of its guidelines or not,”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com