German Wikipedia back on the Internet

By EDRi · February 2, 2006

The German version of the worldwide encyclopaedia Wikipedia was offline
for three days, after a legal complaint filed by the parents of a
hacker who’s real name was mentioned online.

Tron was a German hacker and phreaker who found a controversial death
in 1998. Amongst other things, Tron broke the security of the German
phonecard by producing working clones. He was also known for his
diploma thesis where he created the Cryptophon, which was one of the
first public implementations of a telephone with built-in voice encryption.

The Berlin court issued a preliminary interdiction on 17 January against
access to the German domain www.wikipedia.de, as a redirect to the German
Wikipedia version.

The preliminary interdiction did forbid the redirect as long as the family
name was online in the article at de.wikipedia.org. However, the public
decision of German Wikipedia was to keep the name due the general policy not
to interfere with the content of the Wikipedia Encyclopaedia at all.

For 3 days wikipedia.de was offline, but it was still
possible to access the German contents through the .org address, hosted in
the United States. .

The supporters of Tron’s parents tried to solve the matter in an
out-of-court settlement, but without success. They have raised questions
regarding the conflict of handling personal data in an “open content” system
and the fact that Wikipedia does not have a privacy policy in place.

A first decision in this matter will probably be taken at the beginning of
February 2006.

Berlin court issues provisional order against the Wikimedia Foundation
(19.01.2006)
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Berlin_court_issues_provisional_order_against_the_Wikimedia_Foundation

German Wikipedia back up amid lawsuit (20.01.2006)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/technology/13671242.htm

Tron (hacker) – page on wikipedia.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_%28hacker%29

Some background material about this case (in German only)
http://www.ccc.de/~andy/CCC/TRON/wikipedia