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IntroductionOppressing policies and laws in the name of national security, intellectual property, child protection and many other good causes, often abused by governments and companies all around the world, threaten potential web hosters and web masters spreading critical and controversial information (or just their favorite song) with legal, economical and even more dangerous problems. Web sites like Wikileaks, ThePirateBay, but even Wikipedia, Google, newspapers and many more, face various threats and legal charges by multiple powerful opponents like governments, companies, lawyers, the "content mafia" in general and many others. Often, webmasters cannot afford year-long lawsuits to protect their right to express their oppinion or publish controversial material. So, for them, there are just two alternatives: Loose the ability to exert their rights, or move their content to a safer location. It's impossible to have an up-to-date overview about all the laws worldwide, that you can break by publishing something on the internet. Things are changing fast, and you have to comply with all of the laws of the country your server is hosted, and most likely also the laws of the country your domain is from. For example, if you have a ".de" domain like us, you have to follow the very strict German laws, independent from the location of your web server. This led, for example, to multiple temporal deactivations of the www.wikipedia.de domain. If you have doubts about your content, please consult an experienced lawyer from the respective country. This web page is just an overview, it cannot completely cover all the upcoming legal problems of every mentioned country. All the information here is supplied without liability. Should there be no legal possibility for you to publish important information, there are still some organisations as a last resort. For example, if the material you posess is kept secret and provides information about misuse of power or similar crimes, you can send it to Wikileaks. However, there is no guarantee that your material will be published. Please contact us if you've found any mistake or mistakable statement, or if you have got additional information about possible legal issues faced by web hosters and web masters all around the world. As usual, we don't take any reponsibility for external links, see our legal notes and our disclaimer (available in German and English). Possible problemsFreedom of press & informationAs one of the most important rights to find out the truth and to fight for transparency, the freedom of the press and the freedom of information are the most feared rights by oppressors, criminals and even many governments all around the world. There are transparency laws regarding government documents in many Western countries, like the Freedom of Information Act in the U.S. and the Freedom of Information Bill in the U.K. However, to prevent unwished publications and criticism, often other laws, as discussed below, are misused, just to surpress an uncomfortable truth. But there are also a lot of special laws passed, e.g. to "protect national security", which can be used to fight the freedom of information and prevent the discovery of dismanteling truth. The intention of our website is to protect your freedom of information by showing you possibilities to chose a country with laws fitting your publishing purposes best. But always remember, your freedom ends where the freedom of others begin. There are good reasons, e.g. for personal rights, as discussed below. Copyright & intellectual propertyCopyright was first introduced in the Unites States to protect publishers as long as their publications needed to get even into the farthest corner of the states - but not any longer. Over the years, powerful publishing companies convinced politicians worldwide to extend the copyright protection till it reached centuries. Nowadays, a whole industry misuses this laws to safe their existence and to comfort their greed for profit, despite their own inactivity and needlessness. For internet publishers, the violation of copyright and intellectual property laws, even unintenionally, can lead to strong economic problems through costs for cease-and-desist letters, lawyers and whole lawsuits. In some cases, you can even go to jail for violations of property laws. Be careful using images, music, videos and other multimedia content, which you did'nt create by your own. Even if you know the creator of a work and ask him for permission or even pay him for the use of his work, there can be problems, because the author can have contracts with content publishing companies you don't know about. Theoretically, you have to be informed about them, but even when you haven't, you can still get legal problems, costing you time and money. The best thing to protect you from this kind of problems is using material which falls under the so-called Creative Commons licenses, that have clear-defined and very reasonable rules, depending on the kind of Creative Common license, an author used to protect his work. A good ressource for material of this kind, especially pictures, is the Wikimedia Commons collection. In the end, the best way to oppose the current policies of suing everyday normal people, even children through their parents, is to rely on material directly published by its creators without using an aggressive content publishing company. If you like their work, support them - by donations, buying promotional material, visiting concerts, festivals etc. or just by giving them the credit they deserve and spread the word, encouraging others to do the same. Note: Not only companies and artists can be the ones interested in your money. Another problem can be national or international performance rights organisations. Usually, they collect money from organizers of events, radio and TV stations etc. When work of "their" represented artists is used, they charge fees in order to involve their artists in any profit this organizers could get. If you use one of their artist's work, they can have the right to charge you, e.g. for broadcasting media of one of their members. There are hundreds of this kind of organizations, one example is the GEMA from Germany, that is well-known for suing YouTube and other websites for the use of media content, created by "their" artists. Trademark issuesMost large companies protect their name and the names of their products by registering them as trademarks. The biggest issue with trademarks for a simple web page, is to avoid using a registered trademark - or even a misspelled one - as your domain name. As you will see using the TESS online search of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, even the simplest phrase can be registered already (just search for phrases including "hello"). To be on the safe side, you should keep in mind the following rules, especially when using U.S. or European Union domains:
When looking for trademarks, check the U.S. search engine and the national databases of the countries your server is in and your domain is from. Unfortunately, it can be very hard to be sure about a trademark and if you want to have proof, you need to pay a lot of money for a specialized lawyer who can investigate registered trademarks. If you have great success with your domain, or fear the power of possible concurrents, you should consider registering your domain name as a trademark, too. But again, this can cost you a lot of money, especially because nearly every country has its own trademark registering institution. Even after registration, there can be legal problems with former registrators that see their own trademarks violated by your new one. You should consult with a specialised lawyer to provide a safe trademark registration in one or more countries. Please note, that trademarks can also include graphical and even audio content, like company or product logos and radio jingles. Formal requirements & anonimityDepending on the country, there can be different formal requirements for a website, like a disclaimer (which is always recommended), data protection regulations, an impressum (name and adress of the responsible person) and even tax information. Inform yourself about the formal requirements of your hosting (and domain hosting) country. In most EU countries you have to give detailed information about yourself as soon as there is money involved (even just advertising for getting the website operation costs back). In Germany, the whole impact of the current law on private websites is not yet found out, because court decisions are still missing. In Switzerland, the website can be anonymous, except when you want to make business with customers from the European Union or other countries with similar requirements. Please note that not writing your name or address directly on your web page doesn't automatically make the website anonymous. There is still the possibility for a WHOIS lookup, usually showing your full name and address, as well as the data of the web hosting company. In many countries, web hosting companies are forced or volunteer to work together with the government to identify website owners when it comes to probable conflicts with the law or even just disliked web page content. If you really want to stay anonymous, you have to find an anonimity-ensuring, trustful web hosting company in a country, where this is still possible. For stuff that is legal in the U.S., you could use NearlyFreeSpeach or InvisiHosting (Note: We cannot ensure their trustworthiness, because we never used them). The hosting company should not get any information about you, apart from an email adress - and you shoud use a so-called "throw-away-mail adress" to ensure your anonimity. Payment should be done in cash, by anonymous mail or something similar. Be aware, that advertising contracts or services like Google Adsense can undermine any anonimity afforts, as well as using other external web services. An interesting, but imperfect statistic about government requests received by Google can be found here. A good reason for anonimity is, that even when your server is located outside of you country, local authorities could charge you as the responsible person under their own laws. Even if they cannot reach the web server and its content, they often have other possibilities to give you a hard time, for example by executing a search warrant at the office of your company or at your own home, as well as, in the worst case, arresting you for breaking their laws. Software patentsSoftware is already protected by copyright and intellectual property rights. But for some large companies and their lobbyists, this isn't enough. If a programmer writes his own software, simulating the functions of another, it is his own work, so the programmer has the property rights and other companies cannot make any money out of it. As long as there are no software patents. Large companies are creating pools of patents which they try to use to make money, to get better positions in negotiations and even to damage or eliminate whole competitors. Since 1994, a wide range of software patents are possible in the U.S. At the moment, software patents aren't valid in the European Union, but there are growing efforts to change that. Many software patents are already registered in the EU, despite the fact that this is illegal - for now. For internet publishers, software patents can lead to problems, because various functional elements of web pages are considered as software, as well as some file formats, e.g. the GIF format, which was patented by two competing companies independently, IBM and UNISYS. That shows how obscure the whole process of patenting software actually is. Luckily, the last GIF patent expired in 2004, but the whole incident, including UNISYS suing single everyday web masters, lead to the development of the free PNG format, which should be used instead. There are patents on the shopping cart in web shops, the progression bar, even the double click (by Microsoft, of course) and the preview picture of a larger image - to name just a few examples. Personal rightsRemember to always care about the personal rights of others. Apart from the ethical reasons, there are laws to protect people as well as different groups of people, e.g. minorities, from untrue accusations, defamation, discrimination, insults and threats in many countries worldwide, probably including your hosting country. When you add photographs, pictures or video to your website, you should also consider the personal rights of the people visible on these pictures. You should blurr out unknown people and car plates. How you can do that, depends on the software you use to edit your picture or video files. In many graphic suites there are Filters like "Blur" or "Distort", but you can also use rectangles or other geometric overlays to protect sensible image areas. If you think, people have to know something negative about a person, consult an lawyer with experience in this matter, before you publish sensitive information about this person. There can be protective laws for your publication (freedom of press, freedom of expression), when it comes to persons of our everday's lifes. In many countries, you can also get problems for user content on your page that violates the personal rights of other people, so make sure to have the law on your side, e.g. by having an effective moderating ability of user-created content. Political oppinionsMostly known for suppressing political oppinions are dictatorships like China, restrictive countries like Russia and Turkey, as well as monarchies like Thailand and Morocco. But even in Western countries like Germany there can be problems. Mostly forbidden are racist and National Socialist oppinions (often described as "hate crimes"), but there are several cases, when even more liberal political-nonconform oppinions can lead to search warrants and other police chicanes. Always keep in mind, that sometimes you can get problems for content on your webspace, even when you aren't the author of it. It's always important to moderate user-generated content to avoid legal actions against yourself. The people of the United States of America are very sensitive when it comes to freedom of speech. A lot of oppinions you may not express in European countries like Germany, are legal in the United States. Historical contentDictatorships undertake a lot of affords to teach history from their point of view and forbid critical historical content like stories about the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. But there are also democratic countries like Turkey, where reporting about the genocide of Armenians can lead to legal problems. Because of the horrors of the Holocaust, 16 European countries and Israel have strictly forbidden the denial of this historical event. Many of the countries that were perpetrators of the Holocaust, also restrict other elements associated with Nazism, such as Nazi symbols. But for strictly documentary reasons, you usually can use symbols like the swastika. For example, Wikipedia can use this kind of symbols, even on the German domain wikipedia.de, because of its strictly encyclopaedic kind. Once again, the United States of America have very liberal laws when it comes to freedom of speech, including historical content. For example, Holocaust denial can not be punished inside the United States. Violent content ... coming soon ... Sexual content ... coming soon ... Gambling ... coming soon ... OthersPlease contact us, when you know about other kinds of content, that can lead to problems for web masters in a specific country or worldwide. Countries
ContactUse the feedback form to contact us. You do not need to fill all fields (e.g. e-mail) and no additional data (e.g. IP adress) will be saved by us. Unfortunately, we cannot assure you that your telecommunication provider, any government or our hosting company will do the same. You can also write us by mail or post, see impressum. Legal notesThis page is for informative purposes only. We do not approve breaking or circumventing any laws and highly admit ourselfes to the protection of anybody's personal and human rights, to the fight against discrimination as well as the fight against abuses of power, technology and free speech. All information is true to our best knowledge. It can be out-of-date or we can be wrong. Please correct us if you find any wrong or mistakable information on this page. Once again, all the information provided is without any warranty. For legal consultation, ask an official lawyer of the respective country. |
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