An Austrian has to pay 3,000 euros to a police officer. The defendant, like hundreds of other Facebook users, shared a post without checking its veracity. The posting falsely accused the police officer of unlawful behavior. Now the defendant has to answer not only for his individual posting, but also for the non-material damage that the police officer suffered as a whole. The Austrian Supreme Court (OGH) has made a final decision on this (Ref. 6 OB 210/23K).
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The OGH classifies damage as indivisible; it is impossible to clarify the concrete consequences of individual postings. The judges impose these problems not on the injured party, but on the offenders. They have to bear the consequences. “The victim can demand fair compensation for the entire damage through joint liability from only one of them,” says. Summary of OGH findings out of. “It is sufficient for the plaintiff to prove that he was the victim of the defilement and that the perpetrator participated in it unlawfully and culpably.”
Instead of suing each individual partner for small, possibly varying amounts, the injured party can take only one individual partner to court for the entire damage. And it doesn’t have to be the one who started the avalanche. The victim is free to choose which Shitstorm poster they want to use.
The offender is allowed to retreat
The payer then has the legal opportunity to recover his share from the other participants in the mess. So he does not have to bear the full cost – theoretically. In practice, researching individual participants in a social network, proving their share of the total damage caused by them and then collecting the money can be very time-consuming.
This was by no means a mistake for the judges: “The difficulty of identifying other tortfeasors and the risk of irreversibility (in the case of individual tortfeasors) must be borne by the tortfeasors themselves,” the OGH explained on its website, adding that individual posters, at least “some of them are networked with each other and know to which ‘friends’ they have forwarded the post. They must divide the damages among themselves by means of recourse.”
The damage in this case relates to non-material damage caused by a violation of data protection and image protection, since the posting contained a photo of a police officer. The full text of the OGH conclusion is not yet available, but it should be coming soon in RIS (Federal Legal Information System).
(DS)
