The cease & desist industry

Germany's equivalent to ambulance chasers, with much less of a conscience. If you are an American reader, the 'much less of a conscience' clause tells you everything.

Now that the second legislative chamber has passed the law requiring websites to obtain a license for link preview snippets, the German web may get a little duller than it already is.

The colloquial name for the law was "the Google law", illustrating the goal much more clearly than its official name ever will.

Once it is signed by the German president, the lawyers who work in the "cease and desist" industry will cash in, say the opponents of the legislation.

Small German website operators are worried about the impact on their work since the law fails to provide clear definitions and exceptions.

While not for profit sites are supposedly unaffected, it remains to be seen if running a couple of Google ads to recoup server costs will be considered "commercial". 

We understand the concern of bloggers and non-profits, because the way cease and desist lawyers work puts the little guys at a disadvantage.

Cease and desist letters are not court orders but 'private' instruments. They come with a restitution demand for alleged damages as well as an invoice for legal expenses of the claimant. The amounts used to be in the sole discretion of the lawyers sending a cease and desist letter but there was talk of capping the legal expenses portion. There is a built-in bias favoring claimants, and in a country without small claims courts this favors the bully.

Web sites based in Germany are subject to some rules we consider a weird mix of the old print media laws plus "no clue of technology" laws. For instance, if you run a Germany based site, you are required by law to have a link disclaimer telling the world that you are not responsible for the content of a page your site links to.
And you have to have an editorial contact blurp, with name, address, and contact telephone number.

Both of these requirements have been targeted by shady cease and desist lawyers.

We'll see how bad the new snippet preview law turns out to be.

[Update 10/31/2016] As netzpolitik reported on 6 October 2016, changes to the law in 2013 aimed at capping the restitution amount and the legal fees have effectively failed. A graphic on the website shows the result of a survey by consumer protection organizations that illustrates that legal fees went down while demanded restitution amounts went up.
Why?
Because a whopping 35% of cases are justified as "exceptions" under an ill-defined clause of the law that allows higher demands "when reasonable".

For claimants and their lawyers, a lot appears reasonable.

The prospects for changes to reign in this multi-billion Euro undertaking are somewhere close to nil in an environment that recently saw egregious EU level proposals, such as copyrighting hyperlinks.