I think you're more likely to run into rules printed in English in Germany, but that aside every country has their quirks. It really wasn't that long ago that Germany and France were having a go at Yahoo! over Nazi imagery that was hosted on their services, or for sale on Yahoo! Auctions.

60+ years after the end of the war, it might not be immediately obvious, especially to an American used to 'first amendment rights', that your web page with screenshots from Wolfenstein 3D is possibly illegal.

And that's just an 'oddity' that I, someone who has never even been to Germany, know about.

Another "oddity"- Germany also has/had strict laws about using foreign academic credentials, that have tripped up visiting academics: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,540459,00...

Think again; German rules for these things are different from UK/US rules (and other European nations) in several significant ways.

Particularly in relation to their data protection rules (for example).

Sure, rules differ, but someplace like Germany, you can be pretty confident that things will go through some kind of due process that can be navigated. In places like Libya, I would not really bet a lot of money on that.

Well, maybe.

But you're also running a huge risk because if they find you in violation the fines start to get nasty. We had a client in the UK that was providing hit/redirect statistics, including full IP addresses, to German clients. Under the rules that is illegal - they were fined in the region of millions of euros for it.

Germany's privacy laws are known and probably available in multiple languages. The concern here is that you might not know the law either because you can't read it, or it only exists when the government wants it to.

> it only exists when the government wants it to

every law is applied like that