Associated Press – Jan 20 2006:
The German-language version of the Web-based encyclopedia Wikipedia remained off-line Friday, following a court order barring the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation as part of a lawsuit filed by the family of a dead hacker.
Visitors to the site http://www.wikipedia.de were greeted by a statement from Wikipedia Deutschland e.V. informing them they were required by law to remove the site and promising the group’s lawyers were taking “every possible step to again bring you uncomplicated access to a the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.”
A Berlin court ordered the site pulled on Tuesday, after the family of the German hacker known as “Tron,” whose real name is Boris F., sued the Wikimedia Foundation to prevent them from publishing the real name of their son, who was found hanged in a park in 1998.
I find it bizarre that a Court can do something like this to “protect” one name. And why does the German press go along with this? I thought the US press had no back-bone.
Either his parents have a lot of political pull in Germany or German law is REALLY screwed-up.
You can read the non-German Wiki’s take on the issue here.
By the way, the hacker’s full name is Boris Floricic.
After living in Germany for almost 4 years, I find Germany is the prototype for the future US. More and more I’m seeing the German approach encroaching on our way of doing things. I don’t have specific examples.
claim is wrong, see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite
And yet Wikipedia is still mentioned the person’s FULL name on their site, which, I presume is a violation of the court order, since the site is in the domain of “wikipedia.org” and they mentioned his full name. I am thoroughly confused!!
-Kyle Bandy
HUH?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(hacker)
What is the point of having more than one of ‘anything’ on the net?
Get out those ‘dictionaries’ better yet let’s agree on a Earth language…
I’ll learn it…
8^)
AP had some major misconceptions. The German language Wikipedia (there is no “Germany’s Wikipedia”) was never offline.
The url für the German Wikipedia has been de.wikipedia.org since 2002.
As stated, this claim is wrong. .
Mr Reising. We have agreed. And lucky you . You already know it!
God, I loved Hellboy!
(Thanks for the photo…)