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–something the family has been fighting to keep silent since his death many years ago. As ARS Technica notes:

Trying to order information off the Internet is an exercise in futility, which leads one to wonder how well the judge presiding over the case understands how the Internet works. The very fact that the original article is still reachable on Wikipedia via a different URL illustrates the pointlessness of it all.

Given how Wikipedia works, in that any registered user can create an article and anyone can edit it, how does the judge or anyone else expect Wikipedia to keep Floricic’s name out of Wikipedia entries? In the wake of the recent controversies surrounding the accuracy of Wikipedia articles, one proposal put forth was to declare an article “finished” and prevent further editing. There’s no reason that Wikipedia couldn’t apply that to the article in question, except for the fact that it would go against the very philosophy of a democratic encyclopedia.

If the hacker son were alive today he would be the first one to tell his parents to give it a rest. When it comes to a fight between the courts and the Internet, the Internet always wins. Ask Colin Farrell.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 12:55 am by Insider and is filed under How Not To Succeed In Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.