German Wikipedia site goes offline after lawsuit

Found on Ars Technica on Wednesday, 18 January 2006
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A German Court has ordered the German-language version of Wikipedia shut down after the family of deceased phreaker/hacker "Tron" sued Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. for using the deceased's full name in an entry. Currently, visitors to wikipedia.de are greeted with a notice that the site has been taken offline as the result of a provisional court order.

He had spent much of his teen years working on hacking and at one point, produced working clones of German phone cards. He also created a working prototype for a phone that could handle voice encryption on its own. In October 1998, he was reported missing, and his body was found a few days later in a Berlin park. The official verdict was suicide, but his family and some of his associates harbor suspicions that he was the victim of foul play.

When the existence of the article-which appeared on wikipedia.de on May 31, 2005-became known to the family, they responded with a lawsuit. On Tuesday, a judge sided with the family and ordered wikipedia.de be taken down until the offending content was removed.

And of course everybody now links to the original Tron article (also available in german). Now the family gets the full news coverage, something they tried to avoid it seems. That proves once again that you cannot simply sue information out of the Internet.