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Germany's Copyright Clearing House now requires courts for website blocks

The private Internet Copyright Clearing House's DNS blocking requests will now be reviewed individually by courts before implementation.

At the same time, it is responding to one of the main points of criticism, namely that a private body imposes restrictions on websites that are sensitive in terms of fundamental rights, largely unchecked and behind closed doors. "Under current law, websites with an illegal business model can be blocked by access providers," explained the chairman of the CUII steering committee, Berlin lawyer Jan Bernd Nordemann. This also led to antitrust concerns that companies were forming alliances against direct competitors and justifying this with their alleged illegality, without this assessment having been made by a court or an authority.

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