Internet pirate radio

And now for something completely  the same.

You are in Germany, you grab one of free internet radio apps, set up that server, and start broadcasting some music and some skits about deer or cooking.

That's potentially enough to make you a felon.

Any music broadcast helps you make the acquaintance of the guardians of Germany's copyright or intellectual property rights. Due to some very German quirks and rules, these folks have quite a bit of power. Which is why ungrateful event organizers, school bands and consumers in general have used all the negative labels available to the German language to describe these folks, including the N-word (not the American n-word, the other one).

Your hobby radio station will also run afoul of German media licensing laws if you "can" have more than 500 concurrent listeners on the internet.

If the broadcast software's maximum connection setting is not set to any value under 500, the state may have bad news for you.  

We searched some forums and found that licensing requirements include things like a broadcast schedule, a background check, financial statements and statements about planned commercials, and so on.

Forum entries have the naive "but why", the technical "here is how", the really nasty idiots saying "you just want to do this as a hobby and not have any expenses".

To their credit, the Germans do not have that American brand of DA who can and will threaten some 20 year old kid with almost half a century of prison time, only to step back and go "I was only doing my job" after that kid has committed suicide.