This Spiegel Online story is so crazy that it belongs on April 1, but no, it’s really serious. The German agency responsible for making citizens pay the compulsory public broadcasting license fee has sent a warning or Abmahnung (the legal term) to the website akademie.de. The agency with the snappy name Gebühreneinzugszentrale der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten or GEZ among friends, demands that akademie.de immediately stops using a host of very common descriptions of the GEZ’s work and activities of its employees. For example, to make life easier Germans like to call the licence fee “GEZ-Gebühr”, but the GEZ now explicitly tries to force akademie.de to use the official “gesetzliche Rundfunkgebühren”. Spiegel has the whole list of expressions that the GEZ wants to censor.

Still not convinced that this isn’t a joke? As it happens, these Abmahnungen are a big and growing problem for German bloggers and those hosting and running websites. Apparently it’s quite common to send Abmahnungen even to individuals with tiny blogs, demanding that they stop using some expression or other, and — crucially — the poor blogger must pay the other party’s lawyer! The costs may start at a few hundred euros, but can be far higher depending on the assumed “value” of the conflict. No wonder bloggers start being careful about what they write. And of course the internet and search engines has made it so much easier for lawyers and companies to find their prey.

You would expect free speech advocates and press organizations to be all over this issue, but I’m not sure they are. I’ll try and check it out and return to this topic later.

Meanwhile, akademie.de has deleted all pages with the “controversial” GEZ expressions. I think the word censorship should be reserved for serious cases, but here it really is justified to use it.