There is currently a controversy about Wikipedia, a German court ordered
an interim injunction to shut down the German version of Wikipedia, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(hacker)
The parents of the deceased German hacker "Tron" wanted to prevent
that his full name "Boris Floricic" is mentioned on the German
Wikipedia. Did I just say "Boris Floricic" ? Ooops.
This reminds me somehow of a scene in "Life of Brain":
"Look, I don't think it should be a sin, just for saying "Jehovah".
[Everyone gasps]
"You're only making it worse for yourself!"
"Making it worse? How can it be worse? Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!"
"I'm warning you! If you say "Jehovah" one more time (gets hit with rock)
RIGHT! Who did that? Come on, who did it?"
It would be funny if the subject would not be so sad:
a German court in Berlin ordered Wikimedia Foundation Inc.
with an interim injunction to shut the website down. The Wikimedia
servers are hosted in the United States, more precisely in Saint
Petersburg, Florida. The initial order was however mistakenly addressed
to Saint Petersburg, Russia rather than to Saint Petersburg,
Florida, United States. Finally the German Wikipedia under
http://www.wikipedia.de has really been shut down, but only
the domain or URL. The same content is still available under
http://de.wikipedia.org. Both URLs point normally to the same
content, the former used to redirect requests to the latter.
Now the subject has even reached Slashdot
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/19/2056252,
and there is no better guarantee for fuzz, buzz and traffic than
Slashdot, and everyone is now talking about it. The poor parents have
reached the
opposite of their original intention. An example for an unintended
consequence ?
Does Wikipedia still make sense if everyone could order a shutdown
of the website with an interim injunction ?
The true reason behind the incident is a fictitious work recently
published by a German author in which the main actor has the
same (civil) name as Tron. The parents sent a protest to the
publisher but were turned down with the argument that the
German Wikipedia is using the name as well. There it all began:
the German Wikipedia was asked to remove the name, and was
finally indeed turned down for a number of reason. It is like a
"pie fight", someone throws a pie which hits an innocent
person, who throws a pie himself,..
-J.
Locked
