![](/static/253f0d9b/assets/icons/icon-96x96.png)
![](https://lemmy.hogru.ch/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbeehaw.org%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F1be75b15-2f18-429d-acf7-dcea8e512a4b.png)
I found an academic article (Vogel et al 2019) that analyses this phrase. Key points:
-
when the German legislator uses geschäftsmäßig, this demonstrates a clear difference in intention from gewerbsmäßig or gewohnheitsmäßig
-
the article quotes Franz von Liszt 1881, and this definition seems to be accepted to this day:
Die Gewerbsmäßigkeit charakteriſiert ſich einerſeits durch die auf öftere Wiederholung gerichtete Abſicht, andrerſeits durch die Abſicht des Thäters, ſich durch dieſe Wiederholung eine, wenn auch nicht regelmäßig oder dauernd fließende Einnahmsquelle zu verſchaffen […].
Die Geſchäftsmäßigkeit teilt mit der Gewerbsmäßigkeit die auf regelmäßige Wiederholung gerichtete Abſicht, dagegen fehlt die Abſicht, ſich eine ſtändige Einnahmsquelle zu eröffnen. Ob die einzelnen Handlungen honoriert werden oder nicht, iſt gleichgültig.
-
the term geschäftsmäßig is significant for §5 TMG, but has also reached wider attention in the discussion around the decriminalization of assisted suicide.
So the key defining aspect is the auf regelmäßige Wiederholung gerichtete Absicht, the intention directed towards regular repetition.
This meaning in legalese German is divorced from everyday language.
§ 5 TMG has the interesting construction of “geschäftsmäßige, in der Regel gegen Entgelt angebotene Telemedien”. So the TMG does not seem to care whether you have a profit motive, only that other people might provide this kind of service for a profit motive. If other people would provide instances of Discord bots in order to get donations, that might already bring you in scope.
This is not legal advice, but it seems like your options are to either avoid running an instance of the bot, only running it in a private context without access from a wider public, or sucking it up and providing the necessary documentation.
And no, it is probably not possible to use a PO box because you don’t live or work at that address. The general expectation seems to be for the address in an imprint to be ladungsfähig, so that you can be served there. This random lawyer’s website writes:
Unter der Anschrift in diesem Zusammenhang ist die Postleitzahl, der Ort, die Straße und die Hausnummer zu verstehen, nicht ausreichend ist die Angabe eines Postfachs.
The cookie consent rules appeared 2009, and consent was made more strict in 2018 with the GDPR.
EU bodies such as the WP29 data protection board had been writing since at least 2014 on the need of reform because the cookie consent rules are onerous in practice. Everyone wants reform.
So there was (is?) an effort to replace the ePrivacy Directive with a shining new ePrivacy Regulation that would also harmonize it with the GDPR. At the time, it was hoped it could come into force together with the GDPR in 2018. This regulation would have allowed the use of some cookies without consent, even when not strictly necessary.
But the proposed regulation is disliked by both the data protection side and the industry side, because it changes the existing balance. It was heavily lobbied against by Google and others, and never got ready enough for a vote (report from 2017, and in 2021 the NYT reported on internal documents where Google boasted that it successfully slowed down any progress). Every year someone in the EU tries to pick it up again, but always there’s something more important and it gets dropped again. I guess the effort this article reports on will falter as well.
Some silver linings though: