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Comment by gerbal | Hacker News Reader

It appears to be the drivers who will be fined.

The injunction is against the company, actually against Uber BV located in the Netherlands, not against Uber GmbH located in Germany (Uber is trying to pull the corporate tricks of shifting responsibility around by assigning only "Marketing Duties" to its German subsidary). The juicy part is that instead of a monetary fine, the fine can also be up to 6 month of jail for the Director of Uber BV. That's unlikely to happen, but I'd like to see them disrupt "prison time".

Here is the specific sentence from the Deutsche Welle article that is relevant to this question:

"Violations will result in a fine against Uber of 250,000 euros ($328,108) per ride."

So at least according to that story, Uber will be fined, not the drivers.

Is this something they can take to court and tie up in the court system while they continue to break the law?

Not an expert on German law so forgive me if I'm way off base.

AFAIK no. This is a court granted injunction and can be enforced. If Uber continues to offer services their court opponent needs to demand that it's enforced and then they could try and tie that up, but that's unlikely to fly. An appeal should not delay, though the injunction may be overturned later.

I recall from Florian Mueller’s coverage of German patent cases that when a preliminary injunction is not immediately enforced once it is issued. The other party has to post a bond first, so that the enjoined party can recover damages if it later turns out that the injunction was wrongly issued. Is that also true in this case? That could explain why Uber will continue operating for now.

If the injunction was granted in error, the requesting party may be liable for damages. I don't know if a bond is required. This is how Über bullied the winning party into not enforcing the injunction last time they lost a similar case in Berlin. However, this time the opposing party is not a small 10 people company, but a larger union. I don't expect that this will work this time.

250k euros per ride? How do they justify that?

It's one of the rare cases where we have punitive damages in the German legal system: lawmakers _really_ don't like willful infringement after a judge said "no", and adjust things to the economic capabilities. with 1.5b$ in the bank, 300k$ sounds about right ;-)

The idea is to get the violator to stop breaking the law. It's less about fairness and more about deterring criminal behavior. That's the justification.

Sounds pretty similar to the much-derided MPAA/RIAA lawsuits. This probably won't work out too well for the German government PR-wise, at least around here.

> Sounds pretty similar to the much-derided MPAA/RIAA lawsuits.

Yes, if you dismiss the fact that Uber is a millions-of-dollars business and the individuals targeted by the much-derided MPAA/RIAA lawsuits were not.

If the fine is too high for them, how about not breaking the order and so not incurring it?

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