I'm sorry, but the judge at the Hamburg Regional Court apparently interpreted the current legal situation in a very strange way:

The panel explained that it was convinced that the publisher could be held liable for the contents expressed in the forum solely through dissemination, even without knowledge. After all, he could check the texts automatically or manually beforehand. The way the publisher operates the forum so far even potentially incites infringements, emphasized a judge. It was unacceptable that "those whose rights are violated have to chase after you". The publisher's objection that automatic filtering had proven not to work and that manual checking of each contribution was simply not feasible given over 200,000 postings per month was not accepted by the panel.

It's strange that the legislator wrote something completely different into the law - which explicitly only requires knowledge for action. And this absurd belief in technology, that something like this can be automatically filtered out - the judge certainly did not demonstrate technical competence.

Hopefully Heise will defend itself appropriately against this and hopefully fare better than, for example, in the "Link to Brenner Software" story ...