There are several branches of the judiciary. Labor courts, administrative courts, social courts, civil courts, criminal courts.
All those have their own federal supreme courts, suffix „-gerichtshof“ (the Bundesgerichtshof handles both civil and criminal matters, but shows this split even internally by numbering civil senates with Arabic numerals and criminal senates with Roman numerals).
The Bundesverfassungsgericht stands beside all those courts and has jurisdiction over constitutional actions. It is specifically not allowed to second-guess the other courts in material questions, but of course, it gets muddy and the relationship between it and the Bundesgerichtshof can get testy sometimes.
While it is not above the other federal supreme courts, its decisions outrank their decisions because the constitution is the highest source of legal rules. It‘s also the only court whose decisions themselves carry the force of law.
> The Bundesverfassungsgericht stands beside all those
Good choice of words. They are all called highest courts (höchste Gerichte). The BVerfG concerns only those cases in which a fundamental right (Grundrecht) is concerned, as outlined in what would be called a constitution (even if some would debate that it shouldn't be called, and isn't actually named, "Verfassung").
> It‘s also the only court whose decisions themselves carry the force of law.
This is not true. The decisions of higher courts can carry the force of law. At the very least, Proceedings before the BVerfG don't suspend the force of a challenged sentence.
Unless you are able to, and the BVerfG willing to admit a breach of fundamental right, the court is rather inconsequential -- if you are even in a position to challenge. I doubt that the judicative making law as if it was the legislative branch, is seen as fundamental breach.
The romantic view of the separation of powers does not reflect reality very well. Single sentences of the lowest courts can be seen as laws on an individual basis. Saying they had to follow the law is shifting the goal post to defining what a proper law is (a problem that should be interesting to programmers).
By the way, there are also Landesverfassungsgerichte for each member state of the federation. But only the BVerfG has power to demand legislature be changed.
I was curious about this and did a little research.
It seems like the higher court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) can't be appealed to for this case; it has authority to rule on the matter, but only as a result of the law being found unconstitutional.
To explain: this means in many cases the Federal Court of Justice is the last court to which can be appealed. Axel Springer has already declared that they will try to appeal, but this will be difficult. To appeal they have to show that their constitutional rights might have been violated.
Another note: Then there is the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In exceptional cases this court can be appealed to, for example if a national court's decision has violated a human right. Germany has ratified the European Human Rights and declared that they accept rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. However it is extremely dubious that a company could ever appeal to this court.
(A side note to give an example what this Court decides: A Swiss case has been ruled: A Filipina mother with children in Switzerland divorced from her Swiss father tried to enter Switzerland. The denial was deemed to violate the human right to have a family and Switzerland was ordered to let the woman enter the country.)
I guess you mean in exceptional cases you can successfully appeal to to the ECHR, or is there some special rules that mean Germans have particularly restricted appeal rights to the ECHR?
Axel Springer is a company, not a person or persons. Companies don't have human rights, so they obviously cannot appeal to the ECHR.
As for exceptional cases, I think the gist is any case that can involve human rights violations is exceptional, as the majority of cases don't even get into the territory of potentially violating the European Convention on Human Rights.
It's a bit complicated. In civil law jurisdictions a company can be a «person». As such the company can file complaints or be accused of something. The law defines whether an organisation can be viewed as a person. For example in Switzerland associations are legal persons as long as their organs are operative. Organs of a legal person are for example the board, the general assembly and others.
This means, a company can suffer from a violation of protected rights. An example is the right for information (a form of free speech).
Whether the ECHR would ever accept or has already accepted a complaint from a company I don't know. After all companies aren't really humans.
IIRC from the german articles, Axel Springer wanted to pull up in front of the federal constitutional court and go for something in the direction of "adblockers prevent free press/journalism".
Yes, it's important to understand exactly what court people are referring to. So I strongly agree that "correct" English terms should be used (assuming that the translation is correct; I'm sure that courts in Germany don't really have much reason to care about the translation).
But sometimes even using correct English words is not enough. In the USA "Supreme Court" sounds authoritative. And it usually is. Except in New York State.
The names of courts in New York state often confuse outsiders. The "New York Supreme Court" is the equivalent of "trial-level court" in most other states. New York State's highest court is the Court of Appeals.
I think the idea when they named it was that it was the supreme trial court, with jurisdiction to try any type of case, as opposed to other trial courts with restricted jurisdictions.
BTW, Maryland also calls their top-level court the Court of Appeals, but does not use the term Supreme Court within their state court system.
Fortunately in German we have two different words for "free as in freedom" ("frei") and "free as in free beer" ("kostenlos"), so it's completely unambiguous that the publishers were talking about freedom.
It is of course not really free of costs, the payment is just indirect via the ad budget included in the prizes of products people buy. And the costs are pooled, which share of the costs an individual user pays depends on his consumer behavior.
"freie Medien" et al are idiomatic. "frei" still subsumes "kostenlos" in the general case (e.g. free entry). English has "gratis" or "free of charge", too.
Wait is "gratis" an actual, common English word? As a Spaniard I thought it was a joke kind of thing or used in extreme cases to differentiate, but that it was not really used in English (it is a common word in Spanish).
Its not uncommon in my experience as a native speaker. I feel like the context of gratis is more transactional than the context of free; eg. "Its a free country" makes more sense than "Its a gratis country".
Because that's not how gratis is used. In analogy to "persona non grata", that would be "America is an acceptable country". It may be gratuitous or gracious, however.
So if Axel Springer ultimately prevails won't people just switch to ad-blockers without white-lists? I can't see this changing the financial condition of Axel Springer but it does remove the appearance of an ad publisher paying "protection money".
This just another failed juristical attempt of the private media corporations here in Germany to hold onto a world that won't come back again. Just with this, they drew an immense amount of attention to the possibilities of AdBlocking. Articles now explain how they work, where you can get it or what harm may come from ads, making it available and desirable to people who never bothered before.
Their other big war is on the public broadcasting system. Making it more popular. This time for the younger audience.
Since neither the blocking functionality nor the actual blocking rules are shipped with any browser, that's somewhat hyperbolic.
Users can still decide which code and data ends up on their computer. If they trust Eyeo more than Axel Springer Verlag, that's their decision to make. Axel Springer is free to refuse serving those users.
