Judge Shuts Down German Wikipedia

[jetteroheller]

Just in the news: German judge closed

[wikipedia.de...]

So I would find it good, when wikipedia would have one AdLink per page. This would be enough money to fight in this case with the best lawyers available.

[rogerd]

Unfortunately, this whole case - family, judge, etc. - sounds straight out of 1997 or so. Ironic that the topic of the dispute is a hacker, who probably understood the Internet quite well.

At least it sounds like things have been mostly set right, other than the massive new publication of the person's name.

[spaceylacie]

I guess the judge was trying to get a point across to wikipedia. If it was a site like google, instead of just the German wikipedia, can you imagine? You won't hand over the info/comply, Google? Okay, google.com is shut down awaiting compliance... judge slams down his gavel... oops... guess I got off-topic there after reading some of the other online news reports.

[vincevincevince]

I cannot understand the German used here, could someone tell me whether he was only able to shut down the site because it was a .de domain? It seems that if he had jurisdiction over 'the internet' he could have ordered either (a) the whole wikipedia down, (b) the german language version down, or (c) for the offending article to be removed and not replaced?

Why go for the total destruction of a single domain route - when the content will be available on the main domain anyway!

[jecasc]

@vincevincevince
The judge was only able to shut down the redirection of wikipedia.de to de.wikipedia.org, since the owner of the de Domain resides in Germany.

I think the lawyer of the parents followed a clever strategy. He set the amount in dispute ridiculous low. That meant that the case fell into the competency of a local court, the lowest court in german jurisdiction and not specialised in this kind of issues.

It is much easyer to get a restraining order when the value of the dispute is set very low.

I suppose the judge was startled by the enourmous coverage in the media and after only one day revoked his own restraining order.

Had a reasonable amount of dispute been set (higher than 5000 EUR) the higher regional court would have been in charge and I doubt if this court which has much more experience in this kind of issues had realeased a restraining order.

[httpwebwitch]

I had a thought last night:

At its inception, Wiki was an experiment that would enable us to see whether something great could result from sharing openly.

Cases like these (and others) make it seem like that experiment was a failure. People (as a homogenous generalization) can't behave themselves around a truly open information environment. They either want to control it or ruin it.

Maybe the world isn't ready for Wiki.

[Hanu]

If that was the case, the world would not be ready for the world.

[philaweb]

Well, perhaps the judge is an old person with lack of knowledge about the internet and how it works. He just does what is done when a businesss does not comply - he shuts it down, period.

Next case...

[natural number]

Obviosly, the parents of this boy are trying to protect his reputation.

Now the question is "Who owns a reputation"?

Well, no one owns a reputation, even though we all have one. Your reputation belongs to the people who have formed an opinion about you.

Therefore the judge is actually taking property rights away from a WikiPedia poster, by denying him his right to voice his opinion about Tron.

Woe to the German government. They have failed their people.

[pmkpmk]

I'm joining this thread a bit late. Actually only the shortcut

http://wikipedia.de

was taken down. The regular address

http://de.wikipedia.org

was not affected.

At least I do exclusively use the .org-addresses for German and English Wikipedia access.