It’s about as sensible as wrapping every single word or letter in <span></span> tags just in case you want to do something to them via CSS. Bad coding approach.
I suppose you could recommend an “improvement” to LO that, if such ­ html entities are in clipboard text, that they be automatically stripped out on paste function. Here’s the unicode info on the character in case anyone is curious:
U+00AD : SOFT HYPHEN [SHY] {discretionary hyphen}I meant WordPad not editor. I could paste it into a WordPad document without those soft hyphens showing or affecting the text in any way. I’m not sure why but I couldn’t find anything unusual in HTML while “inspecting” the page with firefox. Consequently, I was somewhat puzzled.
I don’t aim to fix the code on the website. It’s a college website; I was summarizing/copying some parts of its content for my own personal notes.
But just think, if you bring all these things to the university’s attention, they might offer you a great job on their web development team! 
Don’t point them my way though. I don’t speak German, and I’m thoroughly burnt out with web design. I wish this forum had private messaging so I could not pollute the answers with all my stupid jokes. But then all the experts with mega karma would get spammed big-time with private message questions! (I’m not one of those experts, just an average user)
I could paste it into a WordPad document without those soft hyphens showing…
Precisely. WordPad does not show them and seems to be incapable of handling them correctly. But the soft hyphens are still there. This is not good, this is very bad and only means that micro$oft apes can’t properly design even such a simplistic program.
I suspect that the use of all the soft hyphens is actually a form of copy protection … as we have discovered.
Is there a “legal” page on the website where copyright, etc., is discussed?