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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

How much does Germany follow case law? If this could set a precedent, it's worth noting that anyone can generate these AI overview responses and they're wrong like 9 times out of 10 only.

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In common with most of Europe, German legal system is not based on case law. It's more firmly rooted in formal laws and regulations and judges are not required to follow precedent.

They don't have to follow it but leading decisions (Grundsatzentscheidungen) still influence how a lower court judge might interpret the same law. Based on providing legal certainty instead of stare decisis though. It's not a must, more of an... aid

This is not such a decision though; it's a first instance decision at a lower court.

Still - a judge on another case will probably factor this one into their decision, but if they have a radically different view or the case is sufficiently different, they could just as well come to a different conclusion.

The difference is quite subtle in common law v. continental law systems. In continental traditions, nobody really says a higher court decision is binding in the same sense as they do in common law. But even in common law, lower courts have the power to distinguish a case from a binding decision from a higher court. Or later courts may state that a particular argument used by a judge in the higher court was just 'obiter dicta' and not part of the 'ratio decidendi'. In continental systems, for most court processes, higher courts do have a strong persuasive power without formal binding (sometimes it may be stronger than your average "obiter dicta" in common law). So, there is a whole spectrum in obiter dicta as well. This decision was a preliminary injunction only from Landgericht Munich - you will have a final injunction order: https://the-decoder.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/26_O_869_2...

In Germany, you also have the Oberlandesgericht and the Bundesgerichtshof as a higher venue for civil cases (and the Constitutional Court as well). So, this is not like "the law has changed" at all. (I'm not a German qualified lawyer, but qualified in a close enough continental system, and on my way to be qualified in a common law jurisdiction soon, that's why I dare to comment on this aspect)

Does formal law systems lead to a fraction of the lawyer work hours and ambiguity in spirit of the law? Been noticing legal LLM tools which have to crunch entire libraries.

It seems like this would ostensibly be illegal in most places. The reason e.g. social media sites in the US can post whatever and not be libel is because of section 230, but that only applies to user generated content. It's the reason that e.g. newspapers can be sued for publishing libelous/defamatory/etc content, yet the same author of such can post it on social media and those sites are legally immune. Kind of a weird law - especially given contemporary censorship regimes, but it's easy to understand the motivation.

But if you as a first party are publishing something directly, like Google is here, you're generally liable for what it says.

I agree with your common sense take of how it should play out, but Google has and will argue Section 230 protection for AI overviews, eg in Wolf River Electric v Google.

https://www.startribune.com/google-ai-overview-lawsuit-defam...

Previous cases in this space (eg Meta v KGM, Walters v OpenAI) have not turned on Section 230 specifically.

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