Wolfgang Werle and Manfred Lauber became infamous for killing a German actor in 1990. Now they are suing to force Wikipedia to forget them.
The legal fight pits German privacy law against the US First Amendment. German courts allow the suppression of a criminal’s name in news accounts once he has paid his debt to society, said Alexander Stopp, the lawyer for the two men, who are now out of prison.
“They should be able to go on and be resocialized, and lead a life without being publicly stigmatized” for their crime, Stopp said. “A criminal has a right to privacy, too, and a right to be left alone.”
Stopp has already pressured German publications to remove the killers’ names from their online coverage. German editors of Wikipedia have scrubbed the names from the German-language version of the article about the victim, Walter Sedlmayr.
Now Stopp, in lawsuits filed in German courts, is demanding that the Wikimedia Foundation — the US organization that runs Wikipedia — do the same with the English-language version of the article. That has free-speech advocates quoting George Orwell.
“He who controls the past, controls the future,” said a bulletin on the case issued on Thursday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group.
Jennifer Granick, a lawyer for the group, said the case “really is about editing history.”
Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer, said every justice on the US Supreme Court would agree that the Wikipedia article “is easily, comfortably protected by the First Amendment.”
But Germany’s courts have come up with a different balance between the right to privacy and the public’s right to know, he said, and “once you’re in the business of suppressing speech, the quest for more speech to suppress is endless.”
The German law springs from a decision of Germany’s highest court in 1973, said Julian Hoeppner, a lawyer with the Berlin law firm JBB who has represented the Wikimedia Foundation, though not in this case.
Publications generally comply with the law, Hoeppner said, by referring to “the perpetrator — or, Mr. L.” But with such a well-known case, he said, expunging the record “is difficult to accomplish — and, morally speaking, rightly so.”
The court’s goals in the 1973 decision were laudable, he said, but the logic might not be workable in the Internet age, when archival material that was legally published at the time can be called up with a simple Google search. The question of excising names from archives has not yet been resolved by the German courts, he said.
Collisions in court involving free speech, the Internet and differing national laws are not new. In 2000, French courts fined Yahoo and ordered it to block access to auctions of Nazi memorabilia. The company fought the ruling in US courts, which upheld Yahoo on First Amendment grounds, but that decision was later overturned on jurisdictional grounds by the federal appeals court in San Francisco. Yahoo removed the auctions.
Michael Godwin, general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco, said the foundation “doesn’t edit content at all, unless we get a court order from a court of competent jurisdiction.”
The online encyclopedia is written and edited by armies of independent volunteers, and “if our German editors have chosen to remove the names of the murderers from their article on Walter Sedlmayr, we support them in that choice,” said Godwin, adding: “The English-language editors have chosen to include the names of the killers, and we support them in that choice.”
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