Quad9 Turns the Sony Case Around in Dresden
Quad9 Turns the Sony Case Around in Dresden
Today marks a bright moment in the efforts to keep the internet a neutral and trusted resource for everyone. Quad9 has received word from the courts in Dresden, Germany in the appeal of our case versus Sony Entertainment (Germany). The court has ruled in favor of Quad9, clearly and unequivocally. ...
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Fuck Sony by going against this small company compared to Cloudfare and Google.
As they mention, it was an attempt to set a precedent. Better chance of getting this if you can beat a smaller firm, then they can go against the larger ones.
There is no system of precedence for rulings of lower courts in Germany, technically not even for higher courts (albeit there de facto is). That's something you could find in the U.S. though.
The lower court fucked up and it got overruled. The only thing Sony could have done would have been to bring similar cases to the same lower level court again and again and hope they make the same wrong decision over and over. That's about the closest thing to precedence they could have relied on. It probably would have worked for Sony though.
While formally there's no precedence, court decisions still influence jurisprudence (I.e. the interpretation of the law), especially when supreme courts are involved.
From the Wikipedia article on Civil Law:
In actual practice, an increasing degree of precedent is creeping into civil law jurisprudence, and is generally seen in many nations' highest courts.[11] While the typical French-speaking supreme court decision is short, concise and devoid of explanation or justification, in Germanic Europe, the supreme courts can and do tend to write more verbose opinions, supported by legal reasoning.[11] A line of similar case decisions, while not precedent per se, constitute jurisprudence constante.
The last sentence also explains why Sony tried to do this in Germany: they were hoping to have a book sized legal thesis they could shop around in other European courts.