Court orders Wikimedia shutdown
Publish date: 25 January 2006
Issue Number: 1116
Diary: Legalbrief eLaw
Category: General
A German court has ordered the shutdown of the German-language version of Wikipedia, the multilingual open-access encyclopedia available on the Internet, after the family of a deceased hacker filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Deutschland for using the young man\'s full name in an entry.
A judge at the Berlin-Charlottenburg administrative court sided with the family of the hacker known as Tron and ruled that the Web site www.wikipedia.de be taken down until the offending content was removed. InfoWorld reports that Tron, who spent many of his teen years hacking, developed working clones of German phone cards, among other things. He was sentenced to 15 months in jail for theft of a public phone, but the sentence was later suspended on probation, according to the Wikipedia entry. In 1998, he died under mysterious circumstances. Full InfoWorld report
