A Thousand Euros for Sharing

You learn fast in Germany that you can’t repost a photograph without risking legal destruction. Jan Böhmermann found out the hard way when he shared a photo on Twitter—a Nazi, shot by photographer Martin Langer, nothing crazy. The cease-and-desist came immediately. A thousand euros for one tweet.

It’s alien if you’ve spent time online anywhere else. The US has Fair Use, which assumes culture needs room to breathe. Germany’s copyright law assumes the opposite. Every image is a potential lawsuit. You can’t share a meme without a lawyer’s letter showing up in your inbox.

Böhmermann’s response was perfect: he remixed the photo and posted it again. Exactly what the law deserves.

The real problem is that German copyright law is ancient and nobody with power wants to fix it. The people making money off the current system are the same people who’d have to change it. So the internet in Germany stays frozen. You can’t reference work freely, can’t build on what’s already there, can’t do any of the sampling and remixing that actually makes internet culture work. It’s written like the law is from 1975.

I’ve lived here long enough to stop expecting it to make sense. You just learn which risks are worth taking and which aren’t. Sometimes it’s a meme. Sometimes it’s Böhmermann remixing a photograph of a Nazi. The law’s too stupid to know the difference anyway.