Impressum (working draft)
§ 5 DDG and § 18 Abs. 2 MStV provider identification for the three astrology apps — with every registration value left as a marked placeholder.
Read this first. The operative Impressum for this website is infoash.de/impressum. This page is a form waiting to be filled from the Handelsregister extract, published here only so the three questions in it can be reviewed. The values below are not real and must not be reproduced anywhere.
Unlike the other five documents, almost nothing here is a drafting judgement — it is a form to be filled from the register. What makes it a draft is that the values are not in the source repository and must not be reconstructed from memory. A wrong HRB number in an Impressum is a wrong Impressum.
Why this is a launch blocker and not a chore. § 5 DDG is one of the few German information duties a competitor can enforce directly: a missing or defective Impressum is an actionable Wettbewerbsverstoß under UWG, abmahnfähig, with costs, and it does not require any user to have been harmed.
0. Where this has to appear
§ 5 DDG applies to digital services, which includes the apps themselves and not only the website. The information must be easily recognisable, directly reachable and permanently available.
| Surface | Requirement | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Website page per app | A linked Impressum reachable from the footer of every page | Web |
| In-app | Settings → Legal → Impressum, rendering this text or linking the public page | App |
| App Store / Play listing | The store's seller and developer fields must match this entity exactly, character for character | Store |
| Marketing and creator content | German influencer-labelling duties are separate and handled in each app's claims gate, not here | Marketing |
⚠ Open question A — the two-click rule inside an app. That reading developed for websites. Whether Settings → Legal → Impressum satisfies "unmittelbar erreichbar" inside a mobile app, and whether the label must read exactly Impressum rather than Legal or About, is a counsel question. Do not assume the website answer transfers.
1. Angaben gemäß § 5 DDG
This block is published in German in the real version. The duty is a German one and the addressee is a German reader; an English-only Impressum is a known defect.
| Feld | Wert | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Diensteanbieter | Infoash UG (haftungsbeschränkt) | ⚠ Schreibweise zu bestätigen — see § 4 |
| Ladungsfähige Anschrift | [Straße und Hausnummer] · [PLZ] [Ort] · Deutschland | PLACEHOLDER — must come from the Handelsregister extract |
| Vertretungsberechtigter Geschäftsführer | [Name des Geschäftsführers] | PLACEHOLDER |
| Registergericht | [Amtsgericht] | PLACEHOLDER |
| Registernummer | [HRB …] | PLACEHOLDER |
| Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer (§ 27a UStG) | [USt-IdNr. oder „nicht vorhanden"] | PLACEHOLDER |
| [named inbox] | PLACEHOLDER — the inbox must exist and be monitored first | |
| Telefon | [Rufnummer, falls angegeben] | Optional — see § 3 |
A postal address is mandatory and a P.O. box does not satisfy it. The requirement is a ladungsfähige Anschrift — an address at which the company can be formally served. If the registered seat is a residential address, that is a real privacy consequence for the managing director and it is a decision to take deliberately, not to discover at publication. The lawful alternatives are a different registered seat or a professional business address; leaving it off is not among them.
2. Angaben gemäß § 18 Abs. 2 MStV
Where a digital service offers journalistisch-redaktionell gestaltete Angebote, a natural person responsible for the content must be named, with an address.
| Feld | Wert |
|---|---|
| Verantwortlich für den Inhalt nach § 18 Abs. 2 MStV | [Name] |
| Anschrift | [Straße, PLZ, Ort] — may be the business address |
⚠ Open question B — does § 18 Abs. 2 MStV bite at all? Daily, editorially authored content, produced against a written style guide, reviewed by a named reviewer before publication and published on a periodic schedule, has the shape of a journalistic-editorial offering. Against that: it is not reporting and addresses no matter of public opinion-forming. The cheap resolution is to name the person anyway — naming one when the duty does not apply costs nothing; omitting one when it does apply is the defect. Counsel should confirm rather than the product team reasoning from the shape of the content.
2a. Owner decisions already taken — and where the live site diverges
⚠ The operative Impressum at /impressum does not follow two of this document's recommendations. Both were owner decisions, taken knowingly, and are noted here so a reviewer is not left to discover the gap:
- Resolved — the postal address is published. It was withheld for a period; § 1 above states plainly that leaving it off "is not among" the lawful options, and that reasoning prevailed. /impressum, /contact and the privacy policy all carry it.
- Still open — no natural person is named, for either § 5 Abs. 1 Nr. 1 DDG or § 18 Abs. 2 MStV. Open question B above calls naming one "the cheap resolution". It has not been taken, by owner decision.
The name remains publicly retrievable from Amtsgericht Charlottenburg HRB 196057 B, so the omission withholds nothing from anyone willing to run a register lookup — it leaves a formal defect without buying the confidentiality that would justify it. That was the argument that settled the address question, and it applies unchanged to the name. This is the single most important item on this page for counsel to weigh in on.
3. Contact channel
§ 5 Abs. 1 Nr. 2 DDG requires details enabling rapid electronic contact and direct communication. Email plus one further channel is the conventional reading; the ECJ (Deutsche Internet Versicherung, C-298/07) held that a telephone number is not strictly mandatory provided another route allowing an effective and rapid exchange exists.
- Resolved — no telephone number. The owner has decided against publishing one. This is the defensible half of the contact question: Deutsche Internet Versicherung is directly on point, and a monitored inbox answered inside the stated window is a lawful rapid-contact channel on its own.
- What this decision does is make the response target load-bearing. An email-only Impressum asserts that email works; if the inbox goes unanswered the § 5 Abs. 1 Nr. 2 position collapses, because there is no second channel to fall back on.
- A contact form queuing into an unmonitored inbox is neither rapid nor direct, and is worse than no second channel because it asserts one.
⚠ This depends on the support policy being real. Do not publish an Impressum naming a channel nobody reads — the same failure already flagged at the foot of the privacy policy and the terms, in the one document where it is directly actionable.
4. Facts already published on infoash.de — reconcile, do not copy
infoash.de/impressum already exists and already carries values. This draft does not import them, because a value on a live page is evidence of what was published, not evidence that it is current or correct. Three discrepancies were observed and must be resolved before any astrology page goes live, since two Impressum pages under one domain that disagree is worse than one that is merely incomplete.
| # | Observation on the live site | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The page cites § 5 TMG. The TMG was superseded by the DDG in May 2024 | A stale statutory citation is the cheapest possible fix and the easiest possible catch |
| 2 | The address field reads "Berlin, Deutschland" with no street or house number, while /contact states the full postal address is published in the Impressum | A city is not a ladungsfähige Anschrift. This is a known, deliberate omission, not an oversight — a c/o home address was removed on the owner's instruction in August 2026, and the change's own record notes the page no longer satisfies the requirement. The decision was right; the resolution is still outstanding, and the fix identified then is the same one section 1 reaches: a business-address service in place of the c/o line, rather than omission. Separately, /contact still promises an address the Impressum does not carry — that mismatch is the part that reads as a defect rather than a pending decision, and it exists today, independent of this suite |
| 3 | The live page spells the entity "Infoash UG"; the suite's source documents spell it "InfoaSH UG" | One of the two does not match the register. The register spelling is the only correct one, and it must also match the App Store and Play seller fields exactly |
Action: pull the current Handelsregister extract, fill this document from it, then correct the existing page from the same source. One source, three surfaces.
5. Streitbeilegung
⚠ EU ODR — verify before publishing. The ODR platform ceased operation in July 2025 and the linking obligation under Regulation (EU) 524/2013 was repealed with it. The terms of service still carry the old link. A link to a decommissioned platform is itself a defect. Counsel to confirm the current position and what, if anything, replaces the notice.
§ 36 VSBG: a statement of whether the provider is willing or obliged to participate in consumer arbitration. The standard position for a company of this size is a plain statement of non-participation — but it must be stated, because silence is the omission.
Draft, subject to the above: Wir sind nicht bereit und nicht verpflichtet, an Streitbeilegungsverfahren vor einer Verbraucherschlichtungsstelle teilzunehmen.
6. Haftungsausschluss
The liability and copyright boilerplate already on infoash.de/impressum — Haftung für Inhalte, Haftung für Links, Urheberrecht — is reused verbatim, with the TMG references updated to DDG. It is not redrafted here; the same text under a corrected citation is the whole change.
One addition specific to these apps, which the games do not need:
Die Inhalte dieser Apps dienen der Reflexion und der Unterhaltung. Sie stellen keine medizinische, psychologische, rechtliche oder finanzielle Beratung dar und ersetzen keine fachliche Beratung. Es wird kein Ergebnis zugesichert.
This mirrors the privacy policy and the terms and must stay consistent with them. It does not discharge the claims gate: a disclaimer is a backstop under the FTC net-impression doctrine and never a cure for copy that misleads.
7. Checklist before this is published
- Handelsregister extract obtained; entity spelling, court, HRB, seat and managing director read off it
- Ladungsfähige Anschrift decided, including the residential-address question
- USt-IdNr. present, or the absence deliberately stated
- Named inbox live and monitored
- Second contact channel decided
- § 18 Abs. 2 MStV person named, counsel-confirmed or named prophylactically
- ODR / VSBG position confirmed, and the terms of service corrected to match
- Existing infoash.de/impressum corrected from the same source, so the two do not disagree
- App Store and Play seller name matched character-for-character
- In-app route built and reachable, not only the web page
Counsel-owed from this document: Open question A, Open question B, and the ODR / VSBG position. These are additional to — not a substitute for — the four open questions carried in the privacy policy.