Germany"s high court issued a ruling today that tightens copyright restrictions on the internet, awarding damages against a company which runs a site that swaps food recipes, dpa reported. Under German internet law, owners of community websites are not normally liable if users post content illegally, provided they take the content down after a warning. The ruling may force owners of social-community sites to be more wary about what members write. One of the recipes had been posted to the www.chefkoch.de website by a user who had plagiarized it, complete with photos, from another website, www.marions-kochbuch.de. Copying is common on the internet, with many users unconcerned that it is illegal. In the ruling, expected to have wider repercussions on the web, the court in Karlsruhe ordered the Chefkoch company to pay damages of 300 euros (450 dollars) for the breach of copyright in three photographs of food. It said the case was different from that of completely automated auction websites like eBay, since the Chefkoch staff did in fact check out the recipes and put their logo on them. The contributor"s name was shown in only small letters. Rejecting an appeal, judges said Chefkoch should have checked the provenance of the photos too. --SPA
