Legal issues / Disclaimer

There is no disclaimer!

That's the good news. And here's why:

Quite a few german webpages include more or less the same text, most of them with a reference to a court decision concerning "liability for hyperlinks" (regional court Hamburg, file number 312 O 85/98, 1998-05-12). Google lists several thousands of websites from authors using almost identical phrases to deny the responsibility for any contents linked or referred to from their pages --- someone even bothered to create www.disclaimer.de, a site to provide a "standard disclaimer text".

Now, what is this all about?

Apart from this being the most misunderstood court decision ever (especially as it basically states that such a "universal disclaimer" is not sufficient to deny any responsibility), this seems to be blatantly stupid to me: Why on earth does someone link to a page at all if he or she feels the need to dissociate from that page?

I have absolutely no idea why thousands of people put a text onto their webpages which is useless, offending for the authors of pages they link to and based on a court decision they didn't even bothered to read (let alone understand).

And?

That's it. On this site you'll find quite some links to pages I consider worth looking at (and, by the way, isn't that what the web is about?). As anyone knows (or at least should know): Websites change now and again and I do not have the time (nor the intention) to check all links on this site on a regular basis. If you notice a link which leads to a page with criminal content, that page most likely changed since I linked to it. Please drop me an email and I'll check it and remove that link (if I feel I need to dissociate from that new page).

The guestbook is a little different as anyone is allowed to post links there: I check this now and again (every other week or so), so if you see a rather new link to some dodgy content, I most likely haven't had the time to clean the guestbook since that link was created.

 

Further information

Here are three german sites which deal with the "liability for links" (or the "disclaimer") issue in more detail: