"Internet Forums are a very dangerous constitution"

... claimed the judges of the Hamburg court (Landesgericht). This is about a well known german information technology news portal (Heise.de) and a court dispute that arose from the posts in their forum. So far administrators of forums were responsible for the content of the forum messages only if they had knowledge of them. And they were not obliged to read every single posting of the forum (which sums up to 200.000 postings a month!).

According to heise news the judges decided that now administrators of forums are obliged to check every single post before it gets published and then aprove it. They decided that internet forums are a very dangerous constitution and those who run such "sources of danger" could be arrested!

Aparently this decision has not yet become a law in germany but it is on its way of becoming one.

I believe that this verdict is not only outrageous, illogical and unpractical but mostly dictatorial!

Most forums on the internet are non-profitable, run and moderated by a couple of people who dedicate their spare time to them. Naturally, it is impossible for them to moderate and check 200.000 posts a month! If an offensive post is found and reported to the administrators a simple deletion of it should be enough! What the judges suggest is to have all messages on a waiting list to be aproved. THat would mean that real-time posting would not be possible anymore, admins would have to spent countless hours reading messages and approving them. In that case the approvals would take a tremendous amount of time, the postings would not be current any more, news could not be discussed, the freedom of speech would be eliminated, forums would simply be uninteresting and eventually die. The judges suggested that the administrators of forums should have enough people to run them, that would mean that if a forum should function in an almost real-time mode, there have to be enough people employed to read and approve the messages. In 200.000 posts a month, there are 6.666 posts in 24 hours and how many moderators would be necessary for this? This is simply illogical because support forums that deal with open source matters for example do not have the funds to hire so many people! I also do not think that any serious company would ever invest on a forum if it would cost such tremendous amount of money to maintain it!

The judges that came to these conclusions are greately ignorant of the internet culture, of the purpose of internet, of the society of free information, of the open source community.

Forums are the very soul of the internet, without them the internet dies. Without them the developement of technology is going to reduce dramatically and almost cease. Without forums there can be no immediate reporting of bugs, no discussions on how to eliminate them, no new ideas flowing around, no creative minds to grap them, transform them and develope them. Without forums there will be no innovating technologies developing faster and faster all the time, no co-operation among numerous researches from all over the world, no access on free information and discussions on technological matters. These judges simply ignore the nature of the internet. People who abuse forums to insult individuals and companies in any way should be made responsible for. Why make the administrators responsible for the wrong doings of others and kill the entire forum culture?

The sure thing is that even if this law comes to pass, forums will continue to function maybe illegally, maybe in servers of developing countries. Maybe they will transform into underground societies, password protected where only an elite of white-hat hackers have access to. The sure thing is that what is by nature just and right will continue to exist until such illogical laws collapse under the weight of their own inaccuracy.

And for god's sake, to call all forums of the world a dangerous constitution is simply an insult. Forums have offered way much more to the world than they have done harm.