Website operators do not act in a legal vacuum throughout the Internet and have to follow laws and regulations. Especially own content and content of third parties within the scope of a site must be according to existing law.

The freedom of expression and of the press, guaranteed by the constitution, applies, but according business and personal rights do as well. In addition, commercial providers are obligated to publish a full imprint and to indicate eventual copyrights.

The information and privacy obligations and responsibilities of service providers, the website operators providing content and access, have been regulated since march 2007 by the “Telemediengesetz” (tele-media law) in Germany.

The new communication variety of the Web 2.0, apart from many advantages, contains a small portion of self-inflicted chaos. Third parties are able to post content via message boards or blog comments without direct control of the operator, which might hurt copyrights or personal rights.

Delimiting paragraphs within the general terms and conditions or a disclaimer legally protect operators in such cases and allow for a further legal pursuit of offenders depending on the degree of the offense.

Not only data of third parties is subject to copyright law, also own text or image material is protected accordingly. Apart from a regular web search there are various technical solutions to get on to copycats. Electronic watermarks, embedded into pictures to detect copies throughout the Internet, are an example.