Hippo
Jan 20 2006, 10:41 am
This might interest a few.
The German branch of
wikipedia is currently just showing a holding page due to a court injunction, until they remove some apparently contentious material.
English language summary from arstechnica.com:
QUOTE
A German Court has ordered the German-language version of Wikipedia shut down after the family of deceased phreaker/hacker "Tron" sued Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. for using the deceased's full name in an entry. Currently, visitors to wikipedia.de are greeted with a notice that the site has been taken offline as the result of a provisional court order.
Tron, (Boris Floricic) died in 1998 under mysterious circumstances. He had spent much of his teen years working on hacking and at one point, produced working clones of German phone cards.
pootle
Jan 20 2006, 11:30 am
English Wiki article on the case...
Topsy
Jan 20 2006, 11:36 am
bit bizarre, innit? why don't the family want his full name mentioned? seems a bit over the top to me that they can take down the whole of wikipedia just cos of one over-sensitive family
sarabyrd
Jan 20 2006, 11:43 am
According to
futurezone@orf.at you can use an alternative address:
"Unter der Adresse de.wikipedia.org ist die Enzyklopädie aber weiterhin in deutscher Sprache erreichbar."
Jimbo
Jan 20 2006, 11:45 am
Am I allowed to post the direct link to the article in question?
Kza
Jan 20 2006, 11:46 am
Ask a lawyer
But really, if the court decides that wikipedia are liable, and charge them, then that pretty much means the end of wikipedia.de. But if they dont, then where do you draw the line regarding whos allowed to say what, and whos liable if someone does say something.
And does the juristiction refer to the country the site is associated with, where the server is hosted, or the top level domain its found under?
I hope the case just gets thrown out of court, and sets a precedent for unrestricted free speech in the internet.
Jimbo
Jan 20 2006, 11:47 am
Sod it, I'm just gonna presume I am - I can't see why TTM would be in anyway liable, so here's the article that's been banned:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_%28Hacker%29 (and it is, potentially, libelous I suppose - though, certainly in England, you can't defame a dead person - perhaps you can in Germany).
BadDoggie
Jan 20 2006, 12:00 pm
It's not libellous. The article contains only facts and mention that there are irregularities surrounding Tron's death. See
the Wiki discussion concerning whether the full name should be used. The arguments the parents make are weak and without merit.
It is fact that Tron's real name was Boris Floricic, that he was a hacker, that he cracked both SIM cards and the Nagravision/Syster scrambling system, that he was convicted for trying to steal a public telephone, that he created a workable, cheap ISDN scramble phone, and that he died under mysterious circumstances -- neither his family nor the Chaos Computer Club believe it was suicide.
It's also fact that the attempts to quash this information and the resulting shutdown of wikipedia.de will only serve to give Tron's real name a lot more publicity. The CCC should have known better.
woof.
Topsy
Jan 20 2006, 12:02 pm
it's ridiculous, isn't it?
I'm no lawyer, I know next to nothing about the legal situation... on what basis can the family insist that his full name isn't publicised?
BadDoggie
Jan 20 2006, 12:07 pm
I'm still searching, Topsy. I may E-Mail the Wiki lawyers to ask what the basis of the complaint is if I get some time today.
woof.
Hippo
Jan 20 2006, 12:10 pm
Taken
from the ars technica forums:
I followed the case in the german media (I'm actually german). And to me the case seems way more complicated than this article implies.
QUOTE
First the family of "Tron" (I'm not gonna write his name, or I'm gonna be sued ;-) tired to sue the Wikimedia Foundation, Florida, to delete the last name of their son.
The case is based on a german law, which protects the privacy of "ordinary" people. So the media can only write about them with their permission. If they don't have the permission, they have to use a psoidonym, first name, etc. The law does not apply to people of "puplic-interest" (like politians, celebrities, ...).
So they sued the Wikimedia Foundation, but since they are located in Florida, the case got stuck in the diplomatic pipes (It actually is possible to them here in germany, but it will take a long time). So the legal procedure didn't even start against Wikimedia Foundation.
So they sued "Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.", which is like a german dependance of Wikimedia. They own all the wiki*.de domains, forward the to the corresponding de.wiki*.org domains and raise money for wikipedia in germany. But this case also didn't start by now! The only thing they achieved is to shut down the forwarding temporarly until the main case starts. This is a common procedure in german law to protect individuals from harm. Wikimedia Deutschland already appealed to the court order and many experts here think they will succeed.
The main problem of the case will be: is "Tron" a person of puplic interest or not. Since his case and himself were quiet puplic in the past, I personally think: yes he was. And then there were already other media, that published his name. Directly after his death several german magazines published his name, but they never got sued.
So I think everything will be cleared in time. It's just annoying, that some people use the law to fight their personal wars (the parents of Tron believe in some kind of conspiracy against their son, so I guess this lawsuit is part of their fight against the conspiracy).
Elfenstar
Jan 20 2006, 12:12 pm
oh, the family wants to have the whole site shut down for not removing his full name? so now wiki says we cannot even view anything on wiki-de. can't they just block that page? not like i use it, but...
Jimbo
Jan 20 2006, 12:13 pm
Only thing I can see is the hacker part of it - was that ever confirmed as such, or was it just hearsay. Anyway, like I said, and I'm pretty sure this stands up pretty much worldwide, you can't defame a dead person.
EDIT: Ah - Hippo's explained it. Didn't know that you couldn't use names like that...bit of a long winded procedure though, and as pointed out elsewhere, if it's hosted abroad it gets really tricky. Nevertheless, perhaps Ed Bob might like to remove Tron's name from the posts above!
Allershausen
Jan 20 2006, 1:49 pm
I just went on to the German wikipedia and something has changed, there is a link to click on and everything seems to work as normal.
betsy
Jan 24 2006, 1:32 pm
So whenever a German newspaper has a report on parents on trial for killing their child in an awful child abuse case, and they're called "Jessica's parents" or the like, it's because they have a right for their name not to be published? Does this apply to any criminal? And when the Suddeustche reported on an American child abuse case, they used the parents' full names, so apparently only Germans are protected?
BadDoggie
Jan 24 2006, 1:45 pm
The Americans had already been named in print and on TV and were no longer "privaet". Not so here, even for convicted criminals, something I don't understand. Protecting the identity before trial? Yes. After a conviction? No, because if he's let off on appeal, that'll make the news as well, publicising the innocence (actually "lack of guilt from a legal standpoint").
woof.
Darkknight
Feb 9 2006, 4:57 pm
The Court (Amtsgericht Charlottenburg) has ruled that Wikipedia has not violated German law, as reported in German magazine Spiegel, and Wikipedia is likely to remain online. The dispute was about Wikipedia publishing the real name of a dead hacker in an article, and the parents objected to this.
The Court found that Wiki's use of the hackers name did not constitute bad faith or slander.
Wikipedia.de is now back-up and running..
Original Spiegel StoryMore Info Found:This decision isn't final yet, the parents will most likely appeal.
The crucial argument in the court's decision seems to have been that the personal rights of the parents were not violated, since they could
not be identified by their last name. This is actually disputable, their name is pretty unique in Germany. (A search in the phone directory
didn't turn up anyone with the name.)
The court did not consider the mentioning of the name a violation of Tron's own personal rights.
Topsy
Feb 9 2006, 5:05 pm
cool
nice to read a real life happy ending for a change
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