EMZETT.Legal Notice Requirement (“Impressumspflicht”, § 5 TMG)
In short: The legal obligation in Germany to state on a website, in a directly accessible way, who is behind it (name, address, contact) — regardless of whether a business is registered.
In more detail: The decisive factor isn’t “commercial” (= a business licence exists) but “business-like” (= operated regularly, permanently and with an effect on others) — courts interpret this broadly, and it also applies, for example, to free sites with user accounts. According to case law, the details must be “directly accessible” — no detour via a request, a form or a login, no matter whether the answer comes from a person or automatically. A mere PO box address usually isn’t enough; you need an address “capable of service” (where you can actually be reached by post/for legal purposes) — if needed, special business addresses can be rented for this that accept real post.
Our context: Relevant for Emzett, even though no business is registered yet and everything is currently free — the site has accounts, a newsletter and a shop area, which legally counts more as a “permanently operated offering” than as a private hobby site.
In Depth
Not legal advice, but a technical/general classification. § 5 TMG (since merged into the Digital Services Act implementation, the “Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz”, but largely unchanged in substance) requires a minimum set of details: full name (for natural persons: first name and surname, no pseudonym), an address capable of service, a means of contact (usually email, often supplemented by a phone number), and for certain activities additional details required by professional law. If the legal notice is missing, incomplete or hard to find, there’s a risk of costly cease-and-desist letters (“Abmahnungen”) from competitors or specialised associations — a point of dispute that is above-average in frequency in Germany for small/private web projects.
Technically, “directly accessible” usually means: reachable from every page in at most two clicks, mostly via a permanently visible footer link (as at Emzett). A legal notice that only becomes visible after a login or disappears behind a cookie banner wouldn’t meet this requirement.
How it differs from the privacy policy
The legal notice and the privacy policy (a GDPR obligation) are often confused, but regulate different things: the legal notice answers “who operates this site” (identity/reachability of the operator, § 5 TMG), the privacy policy answers “what happens to my data” (which personal data is processed how, GDPR Art. 13). Both are independent obligations with different legal bases — a complete legal notice doesn’t replace a missing privacy policy and vice versa; both have to exist and be accessible independently of each other.
International context
The legal notice requirement in this form (with fixed minimum details under § 5 TMG) is a German peculiarity — other EU countries have their own similar, but not identical rules (in Austria, for example, the disclosure obligation under the Media Act/ECG). Anyone running a site aimed at an international audience should therefore not automatically assume that details that are correct under German law are sufficient for every target country.
See also: Small business regulation (§19 UStG), GDPR, Personal data