germanier

As long as it's for your own personal private use and transport it over the border yourself (i.e. not via post) there is no law broken.

If you have multiple such items in your luggage they will claim it's not for solely private use.

There is no such fixed rule. Many high-speed trains Hamburg-Berlin-Leipzig don't stop in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Sachsen-Anhalt, or Brandenburg through which almost all of the route is going through. As far as I am aware there isn't even a single service on that route stopping in Brandenburg at all.

These trains do have an RE number though, they show up when searching "local trains only" on the route planner (in that case the IC number will even only be visible after expanding details), and all other regional train tickets are accepted on those trains. This will confuse lots of people.

This is actually a pretty common model nowadays, as it saves the commissioning authorities quite some money compared to running actual local trains. See https://www.bahn.de/service/individuelle-reise/bahn_und_fahr... for an overview.

People are used to use a regional ticket with those trains, and they show an "RE" number. This will likely lead to loads of discussions on the train if they will follow through with that.

That train isn't running since 2020 and last December they have announced that won't be coming back for the foreseeable future.

Just search for any Norddeich-Bremen connection in the affected three months on the DB route planner with "only local transport" ticked and you will see the label on every second train. Well, after clicking "Show more information" and carefully reading the grey on white text.

Edit: I tried in English and the warning didn't show up... Hopefully this link works as an example: https://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/traininfo.exe/en/45678/209...

In German long-distance trains, seat reservations are not mandatory and capacity is planed while taking into account that some passengers might not get a seat. Most regional trains (which is where this ticket is valid) don't even offer seat reservations.

The federal state will pay 2.5 billion euro to the 16 states which in turn are responsible to compensate operators (or whoever actually receives the fare for the journey - this might be someone else) for the lost revenue.

These are all[0] long-distance trains that due to an agreement with the local transit commissioning authority accept regional train tickets and therefore got assigned an RE train number (some even added some stops due to such an agreement).

[0]: I know of one exception, though it looks like an honest mistake.

This ticket is personalized.

> If the train number begins with RE or RB, you’re good

A few days ago Deutsche Bahn has started to label some trains with an RE number (e.g. running Norddeich-Bremen or Stuttgart-Singen) with "9-Euro-ticket not valid".

FWIW laws like that are not enforced in Germany by public regulators but by competitors and associations sending out endless of the infamous costly cease-and-desist letters ("Abmahnung"). So just one competitor (or business/consumer association) with enough will and money to fight that question through courts will be enough to settle such questions. Happens all the time with consumer protection laws. There is a large industry of lawyers for both sides.

Your online shop says it offers "insured shipping"? Cease-and-desist letter in your mailbox next day. You don't give a price per unit (kg, l, etc.)? Cease-and desist. Send the required information on the mandatory 14 day return period in the email body instead of a PDF attachment? Cease-and-desist. Don't comply to just one of the other ever changing consumer protections laws? Cease-and-desist.

> Unique identification of the user

"The account logged in right now"

> Unique identification of the contract

"The only contract I have with you"

> The desired end date of the contract

"Next possible date"

Note that specifications like that already have to be accepted when canceling via email or letter since forever. Requiring anything substantially harder than that won't qualify. In particular, customers can't be required to go through a maze to hunt for some arcane contract number that is not typically used in communication with them.

No. There are certain rights to a work you cannot waive, no matter how much you want to. Even less without actually specifying what "anything" entails.

You can try to convince the rest of the world to follow your efficient process. Until you succeed at that you need humans at the interface to other organizations.

I know it's not the "Agile way" and it often isn't done but I am advocating for leaving the details of core business decisions (e.g. how royalties are calculated) to the people who's competence lies in this question: the business development and legal teams - and not the software development team to whatever is easiest to implement for them. The latter might not always be what's best for the business. If you are not doing that, you need many iterations to rediscover what's already known to the organization.

> "Working software over comprehensive documentation"

Working includes correctly working. As soon as you interface with the legal world this means to actually calculate whatever your business agreed to and not something else just because it's easier, produces some random numbers, and exists without printing to stderr. That's not working software.

This typically can't be worked out by development teams themselves, for the reasons you mentioned. And that's exactly why some kind of spec (in whatever form necessary - probably not a document of hundreds of pages but also not a one sentence user story) is needed to capture that. That's what I mean by translating and I'm not proposing to leave that to some product manager.

Of course this can also be fixed by adapting your contracts (which can be an enormous task) but for that you also need some documentation on whatever the system is doing (just as developers can't read contracts, lawyers can't read code) and will discover that many stakeholders won't agree to that and demand changes.

This is all not to be confused with doing a big design of the technical architecture and all features beforehand.

Since 2015, VAT on eBooks is charged according to the buyer's country, see e.g. https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/electronically-supplie... This is also reflected on my invoices from Amazon.

VAT law is harmonized across the EU, which country's rate is applicable is based on a rather complex (and ever changing) set of rules, but nowadays it's mostly the buyer's country.

In cases like this, the spec already exists though: in form of binding contracts. Lawyers already took that matter into their hand and created that spec. Customers agreed to it. Not translating them into technical requirements early in the process is usually followed with a world of pain.

Usually in B2C prices are quoted and agreed upon as gross price (including tax). If the tax rate is lowered, this then raises the base price.

It is necessary to process personal information for that purpose. That's what the sales records are.

> top 5 customers

You probably have to declare that the data is processed for that purpose in general terms but I don't see why consent would be necessary. Anyway, this analytics service claims it doesn't do this kind of analysis.

Why is breaking into peoples' homes illegal (and prosecuted) even though anyone has the ability to lock their window?

There are cases in which sharing without asking is legal without it being required by law.

It's still legal to ask your bookkeeper to go through the books and give you a list of your 10 best selling products broken down by season (given you have all the right paperwork in place with them etc. but no consent of the customers needed).

This is in general not true and German government departments share data with different departments all the time without explicit consent of the affected citizen. This is also not a good example as there are additional legal restrictions for government departments which businesses don't need to obey.

Ok, now what's the difference between sharing "1 bread sold" (with no identifying information about the customer) with a third-party and "1 page visited" (with no identifying information about the visitor) with a third-party?

In general, under the GDPR it doesn't matter much whether you process data yourself on your own server or contract that same task out to a third-party. Either that processing is legal or it isn't - ownership of the server doesn't play a role.

The problem with Google Analytics here is not that it's a third-party but that it's under US control.

Yes, before there was electronic bookkeeping businesses hauled stacks of paper to their accountant. This is standard business practice since literally centuries.

If they want to send you a letter, they have to give your data to the postal service. Again, no consent needed.

This is legal because our whole economy is based on devision of labor. Privacy laws account for that.

On the other hand, it's perfectly legal (and usual practice) to contract out the operation of people counting devices that just tally up how many persons go through a door.

(By the way, a gym can and usually does share contract data including personal information with numerous third-parties such as external bookkeepers. This is legal under the GDPR without explicit consent.)

Depending on the circumstances, telling people to jump from the bridge can be a crime.

The case is about a German public university, owned by and located in the state of Hessia, that uses a Danish service provider to manage cookies on their website, which in turn uses Akamai. That by the way is the reason this whole thing is tried at the administrative court - the defendant is the state itself.