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.”
Wikipedians have removed or restricted information in the past. Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, personally appealed to editors to keep off the site any information about the kidnapping of David Rohde, a Times reporter seized by the Taliban in Afghanistan, until his escape.
Godwin noted there were more than 12 million articles on Wikipedia and just 30 paid employees of the foundation, who largely maintain the software and run the computer servers.
“We have one guy who handles legal complaints,” he said. “Me.”
The idea that this small crew could police such vastness “does not scale,” he said.
Werle was released from prison in 2007 and Lauber last year.
Stopp contacted Wikimedia about both men, citing cases since 2006 that had suppressed publication of their names in Germany. He has won a default judgment against Wikimedia for Lauber in a German court, and last month sent the foundation a letter regarding Werle, whose case against Wikimedia is pending.
“The German courts, including several courts of appeals, have held that our client’s name and likeness cannot be used anymore in publication regarding Sedlmayr’s death,” he wrote.
The letter included a sample agreement in which the organization would remove Werle’s name from the article or pay a “contractual fine” of no less than 5,100 euros (US$7,600) — “for each case of infringement,” to compensate him for “all loss and emotional suffering incurred” because of prior publication.
In a written response to Stopp, Wikimedia questioned the relevance of any judgments in the German courts, since, it said, it has no operations in Germany and no assets there.
“We’ll see,” Stopp said in an interview.
In an e-mail message after the interview, he wrote, “In the spirit of this discussion, I trust that you will not mention my clients’ names in your article.”
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s (李顯龍) decision to step down after 19 years and hand power to his deputy, Lawrence Wong (黃循財), on May 15 was expected — though, perhaps, not so soon. Most political analysts had been eyeing an end-of-year handover, to ensure more time for Wong to study and shadow the role, ahead of general elections that must be called by November next year. Wong — who is currently both deputy prime minister and minister of finance — would need a combination of fresh ideas, wisdom and experience as he writes the nation’s next chapter. The world that
The past few months have seen tremendous strides in India’s journey to develop a vibrant semiconductor and electronics ecosystem. The nation’s established prowess in information technology (IT) has earned it much-needed revenue and prestige across the globe. Now, through the convergence of engineering talent, supportive government policies, an expanding market and technologically adaptive entrepreneurship, India is striving to become part of global electronics and semiconductor supply chains. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Vision of “Make in India” and “Design in India” has been the guiding force behind the government’s incentive schemes that span skilling, design, fabrication, assembly, testing and packaging, and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry