Court overturns temporary restraining order against Wikimedia Deutschland
In the lawsuit between the registered association Wikimedia Deutschland and the father of the hacker Tron the local court in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg has now proclaimed its verdict: The application of the plaintiff has been dismissed. Wikimedia Deutschland is once again legally entitled to redirect visitors to the domain wikipedia.de to the international domain de.wikipedia.org, the lawyer of the association Thorsten Feldmann reported today.
The lawsuit centers on the question of whether Wikipedia is entitled in an article to reveal the real name of the hacker who died in 1998. As early as December 2005 the father of the dead hacker had obtained a temporary restraining order against the Wikimedia Foundation in Florida. However, the foundation does not seem to have been served the order yet. That move on the part of the father was followed in January by a temporary restraining order against the registered association Wikimedia Deutschland, which has now been overturned.
The verdict had been delayed several times. Thus the lawyer of Tron's father Friedrich Kurz had last week doubted that the lawyer of Wikimedia Deutschland had a proper mandate and had dismissed the motions against the temporary restraining order submitted by the association's lawyer as irrelevant. After the court rejected the notion that Tron's right to privacy was being violated postmortem, Mr. Kurz argued that as the only living person to bear this particular surname the appearance of his client's surname in the free online encyclopedia violated the latter's right to privacy. The court apparently did not endorse this reasoning.
An appeal against the verdict is possible. Last week Mr. Kurz had already proclaimed that he would be taking further legal action to prevent the real name of the hacker from being made public on the Internet. (Torsten Kleinz) (Robert W. Smith) / (jk/c't)
Logo of Wikimedia Deutschland
The Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg has repealed an injunction that it had issued in January against Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The court found that identifying the deceased Boris Floricic as the hacker Tron in an article of the German Wikipedia does not constitute a breach of the personal rights of Floricic or his parents, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. It said that those rights only protect deceased persons from libelous or disfiguring characterisations of their biography; this is not the case in the Wikipedia article. The court also found that the personal rights of the parents were not infringed upon as well, as the article does not enable anyone to identify them.

The lawyer of the parents, Friedrich Kurz, called the decision "arbitrary", "tangibly illegal" and a "misjudgment" as his clients have a unique surname which would make it possible to connect Tron to them. He announced that he would appeal the decision, even to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.

The chairman of Wikimedia Deutschland, Kurt Jansson, said they are happy that the court "confirmed our interpretation of the law completely" and hoped that the attorney of the plaintiffs would refrain from taking further legal actions due to the "decidedness" of the ruling.

The court in Berlin had issued an injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland on January 17th, banning them from redirecting  www.wikipedia.de to  de.wikipedia.org.