Germany Labels Twitch a "Radio service", Streamers need a broadcast license

[Tamschi]

[QUOTE=sgman91;52097126]That's not narrow at all. It doesn't even include intent.

Essentially every insult/attack/argument against any religious group could technically fall under one of those points. The only requirement is that it "incites hatred" against a group, even if you didn't intend it to.[/QUOTE]

As usual, truth protects against any punishment here, so if your argument is factual and you don't use it to promote hatred or discrimination there's no issue whatsoever.

[Lenny.]

Also that part about assaulting human dignity is pretty important

[Tamschi]

[QUOTE=CarnolfMeatla;52097826]So if context and intention is not relevant, then say goodbye to standup comedy? Or any jokes for that matter?[/QUOTE]

You know as well as I do that German political satire is usually a lot more cutting than what you see in the US with its much laxer speech laws, and that that's protected speech here regardless of the precise political affiliation.

At this point you're really inventing a problem where this place is more liberal at handling it than most of the rest of the world.
(But to be fair, part of this is probably a cultural matter. It seems more difficult to offend Germans than people on the English-speaking Internet.)

Though, I suppose if you wanted to make seriously discriminatory jokes then that might be an issue here but not in the US (legally speaking. I'm pretty sure you'd still face quite the backlash).
Personally I think that (i.e. 'satire' that is used to promote hatred instead of being just entertainment or commentary) both is unnecessary to comedy, commentary and criticism, and is something worth limiting in favour of the benefits this law and legal tendency here gets us. I'd rather not have the political clusterfuck that is the US where most of the rallies seem to be comprised of roping in people with lies and superficial favouritism just so they can avert their eyes from how to actually solve their or the country's issues. /rant

[editline]13th April 2017[/editline]

[QUOTE=LennyPenny;52097905]Also that part about assaulting human dignity is pretty important[/QUOTE]

(On that note, I wonder in which proportion to each other part 1 and 2 of subsection (1) are applied.
Part 2 would apply to statements that seek to dehumanise or defame people and part 1 is for calls to discriminatory action, if I'm not mistaken.)

Do you think there's an easy way to explain how 'human dignity' appears in German law and its importance (in terms of legislative tendency)?
If I [I]had[/I] to try to explain it, I'd say that German law values freedom to [I]live how[/I] you want over freedom to [I]do what[/I] you want, but that seems like a very lacking explanation.

[Lenny.]

Well it's a term from the universal declaration of human rights which the constitution is based on, so there's probably a lot of books exploring the it :v:

[editline]13th April 2017[/editline]

I like this one from the sidebar of google

[QUOTE]Moral, ethical, legal, and political discussions use the concept of dignity to express the idea that a being has an innate right to be valued, respected, and to receive ethical treatment.[/QUOTE]

So basically once you try to remove a human being of its value you should try to stop and grow up a bit more
In this legal context removing someone of their dignity is telling others that their religion makes them not worthy of ethical and fair treatment

It's actually quite controversial I think, in a lot of political systems you can definitely fuck up and lose your right to your dignity - most extreme version of that being the death penalty

[Tamschi]

[QUOTE=LennyPenny;52097939]Well it's a term from the universal declaration of human rights which the constitution is based on, so there's probably a lot of books exploring the it :v:[/QUOTE]

True, not the least considering it's technically an undefined legal term :v:

To some extent this [I]is[/I] a very subjective matter even while we try to handle it as objectively as possible in practice. In my opinion, our laws and courts here do a pretty good job of recognising that it's (by human nature, currently and in my eyes probably indefinitely) impossible to have absolute individual freedom and finding a decent tradeoff instead.
I don't think it's necessarily perfect, but it sure seems to be the best (readily) available option so far.

[Tamschi]

[QUOTE=junker|154;52097765]What an awful thing to introduce, I thought things might get better with the removal of the GEMA. Finally being able to watch music clips on youtube was already quite a success to be honest.[/QUOTE]

The GEMA is still around and causing almost as many problems as ever.
The only thing that changed is that YouTube agreed to pay them an undisclosed amount.

[Sgman91]

[QUOTE=Tamschi;52097889]As usual, truth protects against any punishment here, so if your argument is factual and you don't use it to promote hatred or discrimination there's no issue whatsoever.[/QUOTE]

Where is that in the law? I don't see anything about whether the statement is true or false, just if it "incites hatred."

Also, who decides what's true? I sure don't want the government telling people what is true about a religion and what is false.

[Lenny.]

It says maliciously maligning and stuff, which can easisly be done using false information

You are very well allowed to tell critical truths about a religion and stuff, just not in a manner that disturbs the public peace and incites hatred as said at the top of the law
You are allowed to say "The sharia law violates the human right which is p terrible"
you wouldn't be allowed to go to a public plaza and scream
"muslims violate human rights, see the truth! let's fuck them up"

First of all in Germany the jurisdictional and legislative branches are still completely split so it would be a judge making the decision
Secondly finding out what is true what is false is what courts are all about using admissible evidence and proof :v:

[IceWarrior98]

How can they label it a "radio" service when it doesn't use radio waves?

[Lenny.]

Basically as said previously the law that this is based on (and the agency itself) is really old, like before the internet was a thing.
The only medium that made you able to broadcast back then were tv and radio, but they just called it all broadcasting because nobody could have known there was gonna be something else that enabled anyone to broadcast to millions.

And now they noticed that because of the law only speaks very broadly of broadcasting that it also applies to the internet and they only noticed that now because twitch and streaming in general gained so much traction recently

It's really fucking retarded and now we just have to wait for the law to be updated to be 21. century, hopefully that's soon

[Tamschi]

[QUOTE=LennyPenny;52103751]It says maliciously maligning and stuff, which can easisly be done using false information

[...][/QUOTE]

I'd go so far as to say it's impossible with factual statements alone.
If you only highlight and complain about what someone actually believes in, no matter how bluntly, that's not maligning them.

That still leaves the 'and stuff' part, but that's for statements of opinion that aren't purely assertions.
I'm not a lawyer so take this with a grain of salt, but I think it disallows publicly dehumanising members of protected categories by calling them 'pigs' for example, and similar figures of speech.
It doesn't protect individuals just by them belonging to those categories though, it only applies if the insult uses that part of their identity directly.