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Günter von Gravenreuth and the Tanja Letters

Abstract

Günter von Gravenreuth was a Munich lawyer who spent two decades as the most hated man in German home computing. In 1992 he invented “Tanja,” a fictional fifteen-year-old who wrote handwritten letters to teenagers asking to swap games; whoever answered got a cease-and-desist letter or a criminal complaint instead. He helped build the German Abmahnung industry, hounded the C64 cracker scene while drinking at its parties, and ran trademark campaigns a court found were built on affidavits it could not believe. He ended convicted of fraud against a newspaper whose domain he had tried to auction, and killed himself in 2010, days before his prison term began. Few people did more to shape how a German generation experienced copyright law.

From Dörr to Freiherr

Günter Werner Dörr was born on July 12, 1948, in Munich. The aristocratic name came later: his mother was born Freiin von Gravenreuth, his parents switched the family to her maiden name after West German name law was liberalized in 1979, and Günter took the name in June 1980, shortly before starting his legal career. The trajectory into law was indirect: an apprenticeship as a technical draftsman, then a mechanical engineering degree at the Fachhochschule München (1973), then law at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. He was admitted to the bar in 1981 and opened his own Munich practice in 1987, specializing in the then-exotic fields of software copyright and trademark law. He wrote seriously in the area, including one of the first German books on software plagiarism (1986) and a Computerrecht von A-Z reference (1992).

Hunting the Crackers

In the mid-1980s, Germany was the Commodore 64’s biggest market and one of the world’s densest cracker cultures (The Demoscene). Gravenreuth, representing game publishers, went after it, most prominently the cracking group Radwar. The relationship turned stranger than a prosecution: the crackers invited the lawyer to their parties, and he came. What developed, in the words of the German Wikipedia’s summary, was a Hassliebe, a love-hate bond between the scene and its adversary. The scene put his face in cracktros and demo scrolltexts; he collected their output as evidence. Each side made the other part of its identity.

The Tanja Letters

In late 1992, Gravenreuth’s office sent letters to people who had placed private classified ads in computer magazines. The letters appeared to come from a fifteen-year-old girl, signed with pseudonyms including “Tanja Nolte-Berndel” and “Tamara,” and asked, in schoolgirl tone, whether the recipient would like to swap games by mail. Anyone who wrote back offering copied software had documented their own copyright infringement and received an Abmahnung (a formal cease-and-desist demand with a fee attached) or a criminal complaint.

Recipients argued in court that the scheme was entrapment. German courts rejected the defense: the infringement was real, whoever had solicited it. Legally the letters worked; culturally they fixed Gravenreuth’s reputation for good. “Tanja” became scene folklore, referenced in diss tracks, demos, and Usenet flame wars for years, and the case remains the standard German example of manufactured Abmahnung targets. The letters were legal and effective, and they did more than any single case to convince a generation of German computer kids that copyright law was their enemy rather than their protection.

The Explorer Campaign

In the 1990s, Gravenreuth’s practice moved to trademark enforcement, most notoriously on behalf of Symicron GmbH, holder of a German trademark on the word “Explorer.” Website operators and software distributors who used the word (including in connection with the unrelated FTP Explorer utility) received Abmahnungen with four-figure fee demands. The campaign collapsed in court: on June 19, 1996, the Landgericht München I found the sworn affidavits of Symicron employees “not credible,” and the German Patent and Trademark Office later cancelled the Explorer mark as a bad-faith registration. The pattern (a thinly used trademark, mass warning letters, fees collected from recipients who paid rather than fought) became a template German lawyers still associate with the word Abmahnindustrie.

He kept finding new targets: after the 2002 Bundestag election campaign he sent warning letters over unsolicited e-card advertising to the SPD, FDP, PDS, the Greens, the DVU, and the Republikaner, an ecumenical selection at least. Heise online banned him from its forums, a “virtual house ban” he fought and lost at the Oberlandesgericht München.

The taz Domain and the Fall

The end began with a dispute against the Berlin newspaper taz. Claiming the paper had not paid costs from an injunction, Gravenreuth had the domain taz.de seized and moved to auction it off. The taz had paid; the proving fax was found in Gravenreuth’s own office during a search. His defense, that he had not known of the fax and that his office was chaotic, did not persuade anyone. The Amtsgericht Tiergarten convicted him of attempted fraud in September 2007 (six months, no probation); the Landgericht Berlin raised it to fourteen months on appeal in September 2008, reclassifying the act as completed fraud; the Kammergericht confirmed the sentence in February 2009. Separately, the Landgericht München had convicted him in April 2008 of misappropriating client funds, eleven months suspended. He had already collected a fine for sixty counts of document forgery in 2000.

The fourteen months were to be served: no probation, given the record. Gravenreuth obtained a deferral until February 2010 to wind down his practice. On February 22, 2010, he killed himself in Munich, having announced the act in a farewell email citing financial, family, and health problems and the imminent imprisonment. He was 61.

His death produced an unusual set of obituaries: the taz, the paper he had defrauded, wrote one; so did heise, the publisher that had banned him. The scene he had fought for twenty-five years discussed him like a departed rival rather than a stranger. The Abmahnung business model he helped pioneer survived him intact and operates at industrial scale today, applied to filesharers, webshop operators, and photographers’ clients (The Warez and Filesharing Era, Copyright and IP in the Digital Age).

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