Official works under German copyright: which data is free

What § 5 UrhG exempts

§ 5(1) UrhG removes these texts from copyright entirely: statutes (Gesetze), ordinances (Verordnungen), official decrees and official notices, court decisions, and head notes written officially for those decisions. Nobody holds rights in them, so there is no license to follow and no duty to credit a source. You may copy them, reformat them, load them into a database and ship them in a paid product.

For developers this matters because so many statutory figures live exactly there. The minimum wage from January 1, 2027 comes from an ordinance (legal basis: Fünfte Mindestlohnanpassungsverordnung vom 5. November 2025 (BGBl. 2025 I Nr. 268), Stufe 2). The mini-job earnings limit rests on a notice in the Federal Gazette (Bundesanzeiger), most public holidays on the holiday acts of the 16 states. Using these values in payroll software, a chatbot or a calculator needs no permission from any authority.

What is free is the official text itself. A third party's version of it can carry rights of its own: an annotated table, a database built with real effort, a piece of software. So for every source, ask whether you are using the official work or someone else's work on top of it.

Which government source has which status

Other official works: free, with two conditions

Anything an authority produces that does not fall under paragraph 1 is free only if it was published in the official interest for general information purposes. Leaflets, information pages and brochures meant to inform the public meet that test. A document that only circulates internally, or was written for a small group, does not.

Even then, two rules borrowed from the general provisions on copyright exceptions apply. § 62 UrhG prohibits alterations as a rule, but allows translations and excerpts where the purpose of the use requires them. § 63 UrhG requires you to acknowledge the source clearly and, for complete literary works, to indicate whether you shortened or changed anything.

In an app this means: take the facts and figures from a leaflet, name the authority and link the document. Do not quietly rewrite the wording and then present it as the authority's text. Your own explanation goes next to the quote, as your own text.

Does § 5 UrhG cover your source?

DIN and other private standards

A statute pointing to a standard does not make that standard free. § 5(3) UrhG states that copyright in private normative works survives when statutes, ordinances, decrees or official notices refer to them without reproducing their wording. In return, the author has to grant every publisher a right to reproduce and distribute the work on reasonable terms.

On 5 March 2024 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in Public.Resource.Org (C-588/21 P) that harmonised standards form part of EU law because of their legal effects, and that there is an overriding public interest in their disclosure. The case was about access to Commission documents. It does not abolish copyright in standards, so an app that wants to ship standard texts still has a licensing question to answer.

Databases: a second layer of protection

Beyond copyright in individual texts, German law protects databases separately. § 4 UrhG covers database works whose selection or arrangement is the author's own intellectual creation. § 87a UrhG goes further: it protects any database whose obtaining, verification or presentation required a substantial investment, with no creativity threshold at all. The maker then holds rights over the database as a whole and over substantial parts of it (§ 87b UrhG), and those rights expire fifteen years after publication (§ 87d UrhG).

Whether an official database carries this right has never been settled for good. In its 2006 referral order Sächsischer Ausschreibungsdienst (I ZR 261/03), the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) held that under German law § 5 UrhG applies by analogy to databases within the meaning of § 87a, and asked the Court of Justice whether that is compatible with the Database Directive. The same order says that a database built by a private company on an official mandate can still be official in character.

For most government data, legislators have since taken a different route. § 2(5) of the Data Use Act (Datennutzungsgesetz) says public bodies within its scope do not invoke the database maker's right, and Article 1(6) of Directive (EU) 2019/1024 bars public bodies across the EU from using that right to prevent or restrict reuse. GovData, the federal open data portal, adds that the right probably does not arise at all for official works under § 5 UrhG.

With private providers it runs the other way. Whoever collects official values, checks them against the primary source and delivers them in structured form is investing in exactly the obtaining and verification the law protects. The values stay free while the compilation may be protected. That is why every Quellenkontor response keeps the two apart: the lizenz field states the official origin of the values, and the terms of use cover the compilation. Which ordinance sits behind which value is listed on the sources and licenses page for all datasets, with a link to every primary source.

Five statements about government data

Open data comes with a license

Much government data is not an official work under § 5 at all, but statistics, measurement series or registers. For these, the license the body publishes them under is what counts. § 12a of the E-Government Act (E-Government-Gesetz, EGovG) obliges federal authorities to publish unprocessed machine-readable data over public networks, free of charge and for unrestricted reuse by anyone, ideally without registration. It gives nobody a right to demand that data.

The Data Use Act adds that data may be used for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, and that public bodies should use open licenses where possible. It does not create a duty to publish either. It only governs how published data may be reused.

The most common license in Germany is the Data licence Germany attribution 2.0 (dl-de/by-2-0). It asks for a source note naming the provider, the license notice with a link to the license text and a reference to the dataset, plus a note whenever you changed the data. The Zero 2.0 variant (dl-de/zero-2-0) allows any use without conditions. For EU high-value datasets, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138 prescribes CC0, CC BY 4.0 or an equivalent or less restrictive open license.

The Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) recommends a citation for GENESIS-Online: data source Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis), Genesis-Online, optionally the retrieval date, followed by Datenlizenz by-2-0, linked to the license text in electronic works. If you calculate further with the figures, add own calculation or own presentation.

Licenses and what they require

Who checks that the values are right

Being allowed to reuse official values says nothing about whether your source gives you the right value for the right day. § 12a(8) EGovG states outright that federal authorities do not have to check their open data for accuracy, completeness or plausibility. The figure in your software is your responsibility.

Only the promulgated version is official. Since 1 January 2023 the Federal Law Gazette (Bundesgesetzblatt) has been published electronically at recht.bund.de. The federal portal Gesetze im Internet shows consolidated versions with amendments worked in, but not the amending acts themselves. If you need a value from a specific date, look at the ordinance that set it, not only at today's consolidated text.

Every value needs three pieces of information to stay verifiable: the legal basis, the primary source with a link, and the date from which it applies. Quellenkontor returns these fields in every response and checks them against the Federal Law Gazette and the Federal Gazette in a fixed review process. For how this works with public holidays, see what matters in a German public holidays API.

Example: every German minimum wage since 2015 comes from an ordinance

Each row rests on the Minimum Wage Act or a minimum wage adjustment ordinance, which makes them official works under § 5(1) UrhG. You can reuse these values without a license.

This table shows the current data of the API. Sources and history: Minimum wage and mini-job limit.

Origin, license and review date in the response

$ curl "https://api.quellenkontor.dev/v1/hr/mindestlohn?datum=2027-01-15" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $QK_KEY"

# Excerpt of the response
{
  "mindestlohn_brutto_stunde": 14.6,
  "gueltig_ab": "2027-01-01",
  "rechtsgrundlage": "Fünfte Mindestlohnanpassungsverordnung vom 5. November 2025 (BGBl. 2025 I Nr. 268), Stufe 2",
  "quelle": {
    "titel": "Fünfte Mindestlohnanpassungsverordnung vom 5. November 2025 (BGBl. 2025 I Nr. 268)",
    "url": "https://www.recht.bund.de/bgbl/1/2025/268/VO.html"
  },
  "lizenz": "Werte aus amtlichen Werken (§ 5 UrhG). Nutzung der Zusammenstellung nach den Nutzungsbedingungen von Quellenkontor.",
  "stand": "2026-09-23"
}

How the response separates origin and license

The query for 15 January 2027 returns €14.60, valid from January 1, 2027, with the ordinance as legal basis and a link into the Federal Law Gazette as source. The lizenz field states where the value comes from legally, and the stand field states when it was last checked against the source, in this case on September 23, 2026.

That lets your interface show both without any extra lookup: the ordinance with a link under the figure, the review date next to it. The German minimum wage dataset page shows the same details in its table.

What § 5 UrhG does not make free

• Private normative works such as DIN standards that a statute merely refers to (§ 5(3) UrhG).
• Government texts that were not published for general information, such as internal reports.
• Statistics and measurement series a body offers under its own license. The license applies there.
• Commentary, explanations and unofficial head notes that publishers write on statutes and judgments.
• A private provider's compilation built with substantial investment (§ 87a UrhG).

How to credit government data in your app

• For values from a statute, ordinance or official notice: legal basis and a link to the promulgated version. Optional, but useful when users ask.
• For other official works: name the authority and the document clearly, keep the wording unchanged, put your own explanation separately.
• For dl-de/by-2-0: provider, license notice with a link to the license text, reference to the dataset, and a note on any changes.
• For GENESIS-Online: the citation Destatis recommends, optionally with the retrieval date, plus own calculation where you computed something.
• For every value: the date from which it applies and the date it was last checked.

Checklist for your project