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Quad9 Turns the Sony Case Around in Dresden (quad9.net)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There is no system of precedence for rulings of lower courts in Germany, technically not even for higher courts (albeit there de facto is). That's something you could find in the U.S. though.

The lower court fucked up and it got overruled. The only thing Sony could have done would have been to bring similar cases to the same lower level court again and again and hope they make the same wrong decision over and over. That's about the closest thing to precedence they could have relied on. It probably would have worked for Sony though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

While formally there's no precedence, court decisions still influence jurisprudence (I.e. the interpretation of the law), especially when supreme courts are involved.

From the Wikipedia article on Civil Law:

In actual practice, an increasing degree of precedent is creeping into civil law jurisprudence, and is generally seen in many nations' highest courts.[11] While the typical French-speaking supreme court decision is short, concise and devoid of explanation or justification, in Germanic Europe, the supreme courts can and do tend to write more verbose opinions, supported by legal reasoning.[11] A line of similar case decisions, while not precedent per se, constitute jurisprudence constante.

The last sentence also explains why Sony tried to do this in Germany: they were hoping to have a book sized legal thesis they could shop around in other European courts.