Legal

This blog is a private non-commercial website. All content is either owned by me or available freely (for non-commercial use). Unless otherwise noted, all content owned by me is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

German law requires some information to be provided on websites in certain cases. The tele-media law TMG §5 states the following.

Diensteanbieter haben für geschäftsmäßige, in der Regel gegen Entgelt angebotene Telemedien folgende Informationen leicht erkennbar, unmittelbar erreichbar und ständig verfügbar zu halten¹

This means that service providers need to provide certain information easily visible, immediately and permanently accessible for media that is potentially commercial, usually with payment. As this blog is neither commercial, nor does it cost anything to read, it can be concluded that this law does not apply here.

Then there is the regulation on information requirements for service providers DL-InfoV. This would also make providing some information necessary, however §1 limits its applicability.

(1) Diese Verordnung gilt für Personen, die Dienstleistungen erbringen, die in den Anwendungsbereich des Artikels 2 der Richtlinie 2006/123/EG des Europäischen Parlaments und des Rates vom 12. Dezember 2006 über Dienstleistungen im Binnenmarkt (ABl. L 376 vom 27.12.2006, S. 36) fallen.²

This means that this law only applies to people that provide a service (Dienstleistung). Now, this word is defined in the AEUV, specifically in article 57.

Dienstleistungen im Sinne der Verträge sind Leistungen, die in der Regel gegen Entgelt erbracht werden, soweit sie nicht den Vorschriften über den freien Waren- und Kapitalverkehr und über die Freizügigkeit der Personen unterliegen.³

This reaffirms that services that are generally provided for a fee are meant with Dienstleistungen. This means that DL-InfoV does not apply to this blog.

The last law that is relevant to this is the interstate broadcasting agreement RStV. This regulates how broadcasting on tele-media is allowed to happen. Curious are §54 (2), which states that anything that looks like journalistic content must follow journalistic guidelines, meaning that content providers must check content, sources and truthiness before publishing anything. §54 (3) states that when presenting surveys, it must be explicitly stated if they are representative or not. But actually relevant here is §55.

(1) Anbieter von Telemedien, die nicht ausschließlich persönlichen oder familiären Zwecken dienen, haben folgende Informationen leicht erkennbar, unmittelbar erreichbar und ständig verfügbar zu halten…⁴

This states that anyone who provides tele-media, which is not exclusively personal or family-related, needs to provide some specific information. Since this blog is entirely non-commercial and personal, this regulation does not apply. This blog is available online, but it has a target audience of one, which is me. I put it online anyways so that I can always access it.

Impressum

While I, after carefully reading all relevant laws, do not think that I am legally required to provide information about myself here, I decided to provide some anyways in case I need to be contacted about something.

My email address is public knowledge and can be looked up by checking out my git commits on GitHub or GitLab, see the About page for links.

As it is unwise to provide my real address online, here is an address that you can use to send me letters. Note that I might not read them, if you want to contact me I recommend sending me an email.

Patrick Elsen  
Nordstrasse 5
DE-99427 Weimar
Germany