The new German amendments concerning the consumer protection legislation

As of June 13th, 2014 the new rules for consumer protection – laid down in EU-Directive 2011/83/EU – will be implemented in the German Civil Code (BGB) and the Introductory Act to the Civil Code. These new rules mainly effect the so called long-distance transactions. This term refers especially to online-purchase, but also to telemarketing, catalogue selling and other kinds of businesses, where contracts are…

Fine imposed because of open mailing list

In a press release dated 28.06.2013 the Bavarian Data Protection Authorities (BayLDA) announced that they imposed a fine against the management of a commercial enterprise because one of their employees sent a newsletter with an open mailing list. According to the press release, a female employee of a commercial enterprise had written a short e-mail to clients. The e-mail consisted of 10 pages (DIN A…

The data retention directive and the ECJ

In its ruling of today (08.04.2014 – file ref.: C-293/12 and C-594/12) the European Court of Justice found that the Data Retention Directive is not consistent with EU law. The European Court of Justice ruled in favour of a lawsuit of an Irish civil rights defence organization and of various Austrian citizens as well as of the Carinthia government. They had pleaded that storing data…

Design Act – Amendments to the existing legal position

Since 01.01.2014 the Law on the Legal Protection for Design ( Design Act, dated 10.10.2013) has been in force and thus has replaced the present Law on design patent. In addition to the terminological change of “design patents” as industrial property rights in “designs”, the application for a declaration of invalidity with the German Patent and Trademark Office (§ 34 Design Act) was implemented. This…

Max versus Medusa

At the end of January the civil chamber 24 of the Hamburg Regional Court (324 O 264/11) announced the eagerly awaited judgement of the former president of the FIA, Max M., against Google. The matter in dispute are numerous photos showing the plaintiff’s picture as well as his special posture, all of which can be found via the defendant’s search engine. The photos originate from…