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My understanding (but IANAL and my German is poor) from the judgement http://www.lg-duesseldorf.nrw.de/presse/pressemitteilungen_ab_2009/13-11.pdf (small PDF) and also from this article http://www.chip.de/news/Galaxy-Tab-10.1-Verkaufsverbot-endgueltig-bestaetigt_50819592.html is that this is not a decision on the patent, but simple the rejection of Samsungs attempt to have the provisional injunction lifted. The real case is due maybe mid-2012 !

The tendendcy that the government tries to "protect" citicens from dangerous thoughts is, unfortunately, not limited to China. In a western democracy it can happen as well.

E.g., in Germany we have a provincial government official named Juergen Buessow from the social democratic party (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_B%C3%BCs sow, German) who tries to filter Nazi propaganda and pages linking to Nazi propaganda from the net. He argues: "There is no freedom of information when minorities are discriminated against by this information" (http://www.brd.nrw.de/BezRegDdorf/hierarchie/news /newsticker/271_2003.php, German). Af first, there was a public outcry, online demonstrations, conventions, finally a law suit on which his position was first corrected, then confirmed. Today, the situation is unclear, courts rule differently on various cases where Mr. Buessow tries to get web sites censored.

The interesting point is that he seems to believe that information can act and do harm by itself.

Therefore, traffic infomation needs to be distributed very rapidly and distantly from the scene of the problem in order to have any influence on the situation.

Do you mean like this?

Not only is the existing traffic shown but also a prediction over the next hour, based on traffic monitoring and a specialy developed algorithm.

Maybe someone with knowledge in US and German law can comment on those alternatives from "Kompetenznetzwerk Universitätsverbund MultiMedia NRW"?

I listed the WDR (and this website) as an official outlet which offers factual information concering the existence of technical measures, not "gossip". It seems that the parent had doubts that web censorship is real. These links prove it. Some sources are in favor of this kind of censorship, some are against it, some are to loyal to be against it, some aren't sure which opinion hurts their business more. The picture is complex. Someone who's interested in all aspects has a lot of reading material to go through. My intention was simply to remove doubts about the situation. It's not a fictional debate.

WDR (Radio+Television), WDR, Heise Newsticker, Bezirksregierung Düsseldorf (Regional Government), Chaos Computer Club Duesseldorf (many more links), CCC's anti censorship tutorial (and more links)

There are protests, but the regional government has chosen its first targets wisely: Only nazi sites are to be blocked even though the law applies to a much wider range of content (The law doesn't really afford this censorship in my opinion, but if one thinks it can be used against nazi sites, then it could also be used against many other sites.) Since there is a broad consensus against nazis, protesters are easily discredited as nazi sympathizers.

I know, this is not about copyrights but about trademarks, so mod me OT.

There is a VERY interesting case in Germany (yes, this is in europe): a company held a trademark of the name 'explorer' without having a product or anything. They made microsoft to pay (only) around $/Euro 90.000 and sued a couple of companies for abusing their trademark (i.e. the publisher heinz heise verlag for selling cd's with their magazines with a software called FTPExplorer on it).

The Oberlandesgericht of Cologne now canceled this trademark (translated by google) because it never was used for serious reasons but only to make money by sueing other companies.

Exactly the same thing happened (transleted by uhm... you know.) to a patent that covered the creation of human and animal embryos. After they realized what they did, the simply removed the patent after a LOUD shout out of politicians, medics and uh, guys like me.

Currently there are two lines in planning with Maglev technology in Germany. It's called the "Metrorapid", and one line is planned in Northrine Westphalia and the other one in Bavaria. They want to have the tracks ready for the next soccer world cup in 2006. You can find more information here (in german) or try the google translation.

This ruling does not actually apply to all forums. For instance, Slashdot would not be affected. The court's explanation (google translation) clearly states that the decision was based on the fact that Microsoft has "acquired" the posted information by closely integrating it into their site and, more importantly, by claiming rights to it.

The article says that the government threatened the ISPs with fees up to 1 Million DM if they don't comply. ISIS forwarded e-mails concerning the matter to the government. The article ends with bashing on ISIS for taking back their measures.

Now that ISIS has stopped blocking the sites under massive objection from free speech advocates, the local government has released a press statement in which they claim that ISIS gave in to racist pressure. Guess we're all nazis now because we didn't want to allow our government to take the easy route to complete content control.
The statement is here: Pressemitteilung 467/2001 der Bezirksregierung Düsseldorf vom 22.11.2001

In this Press-Release (german of course) the government claims that the ISPs efforts must have been effective because of all the e-mails they received from people complaining about this sort of censorship. I wonder how many consumers of Nazi-content are among those who (like me) protested against the governments course to violate some of our constitutional rights.