Database

Under the Directive on Data Retention, operators were required to retain certain categories of traffic and location data (excluding the content of those communications) for a period between six months and two years and to make them available, on request, to law enforcement authorities for the purposes of investigating, detecting and prosecuting serious crime and terrorism. On 8 April 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union declared the Directive invalid. However, not all national laws which implemented the Directive have been overturned.

In 2010, the German Constitutional court found the implementation of the Directive on Data retention was unconstitutional. Yet, in October 2015, a new data retention law has passed, which will enter into force in 2017. The law provides that telecommunication providers must retain data such as phone numbers, the time and place of communication (except for emails), and the IP addresses for either four or 10 weeks. The data is to be stored in servers located within Germany (§113b).

According to the German Commercial Code, accounting documents and business letters must be stored in Germany.

Under the Tax Code, all persons and companies liable to pay taxes that are obliged to keep books and records must keep those records in Germany. There are some exceptions for multinational companies.

The Act on Value Added Tax states that invoices must be stored within the country, including when stored electronically. Alternatively, in case of electric storage, they may be stored within the territory of the EU if full online access and the possibility of download are guaranteed. In this case, the entity is obliged to notify the competent tax authority in writing of the location of the electronically stored invoices, and the tax authority may access and download the data.

There is no European prohibition of data transfer, neither has any EU Member State implemented a national prohibition of data transfer. However, the data protection authority (DPA) at the German federal state of Schleswig Holstein has declared in a position paper that all data protection instruments for the transfer of data to the US after the European Court of Justice's Schrems v Facebook judgment are going to be illegal. The DPA it has not taken any action in this regard, but has threatened to do so.

Since 2009, Germany has implemented regulation that enacts an increase of the minimum salary for high-skilled foreign workers as part of the Council Directive 2009/50/EC for highly qualified employment.

For intra-corporate transferees (ICT) there is a limitation of stay of three years, but renewable. For contract service supplier (CSS) and independent service suppliers (ISS), there are also limitations of stay of three years, but can be extension and eventually permanent residence is possible for an ISS.

IT specialists under contractual services supplier (CSS) can enter on the basis of being sent by foreign employer for the short term where no test is required, but duration of stay is three months in one year.

For independent services suppliers (ISS), economic and regional needs tests are required. However, the German Ministry of Labour notes that this labour market test is merely used as a priority check and that this check can either be waived entirely for skilled workers or replaced by a comparability check of local working conditions.

It is reported that several operators in Member States of the European Union, including France, Germany and the Czech Republic, are charging higher rates for the termination of international traffic originating from outside the EU than for international traffic between sovereign states inside the EU. This has been identified as a barrier by the USTR 2015 Section 1377 Review On Compliance with Telecommunications Trade Agreements. This situation could severely hamper the ability of non-EU firms to compete with Deutsche Telekom, which is the major supplier network.

Deutsche Telekom, the incumbent, was privatized, but the German State still owns a minority share of 31.7%. In particular, 14.8% is owned by the Federation and 16.9% by KfW Bank which is state-owned.

Telecommunications networks and services in Germany are liberalized and competition rules apply. However, the access to the last mile is still owned by the incumbent.

Germany extended its copyright systems to include the notion of a tax or levy on links or quotations (so-called ancillary copyright). Google announced that it would de-index snippets from German publishers. In response, the publishers’ collecting society VG Media complained to German competition authorities. The society took the position that Google was obligated to continue indexing its sites and nevertheless still pay the levy. As a result, newspapers gave Google the right to run snippets for free, despite the new ancillary copyright law.

In the European Union, there is no general principle for the use of copyright protected material comparable to the fair use/fair dealing principle in the US. Directive 2001/29/EC defines an optional, but exhaustive set of limitations from the author´s exclusive rights under the control of the “three-step test”. This is a clause in the Berne Convention that establishes three cumulative conditions to the limitations and exceptions of a copyright holder’s rights. The Directive has been transposed by Member States with significant freedom.

Germany, as most of the continental Europe, follows the droit d’auteur (author’s right) tradition, where exceptions are enumerated in an exhaustive fashion and the law of copyright does not provide for an overriding rule of fairness.

German law may impose on a market-dominant holder the obligation to compulsory licence a standards-essential patent (SEP). In particular, the German Orange Book approach requires the prospective licensee to determine the appropriate royalty amount. If it later turns out that the amount determined was too low, the case can be revised.
Lower German courts and appeal courts have applied these criteria to many injunction requests, including those concerning SEPs.

A German court dismissed Apple's rights over the European Patent EP2059868, a technique Apple invented to simplify the navigation and direct manipulation of photos, often referred to as simply the "bounce back" patent. The argument was launched by Google based on the idea that Steve Jobs' original presentation of the iPhone's new technique in 2007 was "prior art", a line of reasoning that is legal in Germany.