The policy change also doesn't create a new court. The CUII is a voluntary cooperation whose members exchange information about sites they think they're required to block and agree to all block them simultaneously. Because this structurally looks like an illegal cartel, there used to be a review step by the Federal Network Agency Bundesnetzagentur to make sure that no illegal cartel things were going on.
The Bundesnetzagentur felt that this wasn't really part of their core duties, especially considering that there was a perfectly fine court system ready to use, so they asked the CUII to find another way of not looking like an illegal cartel.
Now the CUII will wait for one of their ISP members to get sued, in regular civil court, and if the ISP is ordered to perform a block, the CUII will put it on their list and the other ISPs will follow suit without having to redo the legal proceedings for each of them.
This change might very well end up increasing the number sites that get blocked, not due to rubberstamping, but because losing a civil suit is less risky than accidentally doing illegal cartel stuff and incurring a correspondingly large fine.
If you think copyrights should exist at all, website blocks must exist as well, otherwise copyrights become unenforceable. Blocking straightforwardly copyright infringement sites (eg. a site that streams full episodes of TV shows) is a pretty logical consequence of a government enforcing its copyright laws.
"Hide piracy web sites from mainstream search engines" is the extent of what I'm willing to tolerate. Tools that allow for blocking of arbitrary websites entirely should not exist at all.
Does this include websites for drugs, CSAM, human trafficking, or other criminal activity?
Given there is some sort of fair use in most jurisidictions, and its compeltly with in even europeans rights to save entire movies for personal use, the parent comment to you is right. Tools exist for them to enforce them by going after the domain registrar or hosting provider.
All site blocking does is trample on rights over "alleged" infrignment.
I don't get it, is your claim that the rightsholders can sue in German courts and get an injunction if they want sites blocked, or that site blocks shouldn't be needed at all because suing people (but not blocking the sites) is an adequate remedy for infringement?
> Tools exist for them to enforce them by going after the domain registrar or hosting provider.
What if the domain registrar or hosting provider is in another country? If some Chinese company is infringing on some German company's IP, is your response to tell them to sue them in China, rather than have the goods be blocked at the border?
>Given there is some sort of fair use in most jurisidictions, and its compeltly with in even europeans rights to save entire movies for personal use, the parent comment to you is right.
Unless there's some context that's missing from the article, the sites being blocked seems like they're straightforwardly committing copyright infringement. It's not like youtube-dl is being taken down or whatever. "movie streaming sites are fine because there's a tiny chance that it's used by someone who already owns the movie" seems like a flimsy excuse to allow such sites to continue operating.
