Germans take on Wikipedia for naming punished killers

• Germans take on Wikipedia for naming punished killers

  tags: jurisdiction

  • A foreign power should not be able to censor publications in the United States, regardless of whether doing so suits the country's domestic law.

The brief facts recounted in the press report are as follows.

Two German men are now suing Wikipedia in respect of a description of their crimes on this website. These men murdered an actor in 1990. Their quarrel with Wikipedia, is that the publication of the crimes, falls foul of German privacy and criminal laws. It is claimed that under German law, crimes regarded as 'spent' cannot be referred to in publications. The two Germans served their life sentences and were released in 2007 and 2008 respectively. According to their lawyer, Alexander Stopp,ex-criminals have rights to privacy:
''They should be able … lead a life without being publicly stigmatised'' for their crime, he told The New York Times. ''A criminal has a right to privacy, too, and a right to be left alone.''

In Germany, the german edition of Wikipedia has removed the killers' names and their involvement with the victim, Walter Sedlmayr.

Alexander Stopp has filed a suit in Germany requiring the Wikimedia Foundation to remove his clients names English-language article.

Herein we have the reenactment of the well-known case of Yahoo!Nazi Auction Website In April 2000, two French Anti-Racisicm Organisations sued Yahoo!, a US incorporated corporation, in France. The Organisations argued that Yahoo!, by hosting Nazi auction sites, were violating French laws against selling Nazi goods. Any perception of the Internet
was unregulable, or that cyberspace was a separate space for interactions and communications, were dispelled. Yahoo! was ordered by the French judge to put in place technological filters so that French citizens could not access Nazi memorabilia, even though the auction sites were hosted from servers in Sweden.


It is worth reminding ourselves the observations made Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu in their book, Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World .
In this book, they argue that the Internet will be increasingly balkanized/fragmented, as legal and technological measures, continue to be used to impose geo-political rules and norms. They have reiiterated these statements in an article published in Legal Affairs.

Can or should Wikimedia accede to any putative request to censor the materials. Again, Yahoo! can provide us with some possible answers. It may be recalled that in Yahoo!, the US corporation's financial interests in France, led it to removing the Nazi materials on its website and installing geo-ID filters.

NY Times coverage here.
Wikimedia site here.
The EFF has resources here