In 1990 two Germans, Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber, killed the actor Walter Sedlmayr and were convicted of the crime in a German court of law. Now the lawyers for the murderers have sued Wikipedia to remove their names and likeness from any articles concerning Sedlmayer and the murder. The lawsuit claims that a 1973 German privacy law, designed to help criminals
re-integrate into society, prevents the man being named in association
with Walter Sedlmayr's murder. In Germany, the lawsuit has been successful. All German publications now scrub the murderers names from any coverage of Sedlmayer and his brutal murder. And the German Wikipedia article on Sedlmayer has removed any mention of Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber. But that is not enough for the law firm representing the killers – aptly named Stopp & Stopp. They now want the American Wikipedia site to remove the names of the convicted murderers, citing the German law. That can never happen in America where freedom of speech is sacrosanct.
The New York Times promptly printed the names of the murders along with (in the print edition) their photographs.
The laws pertaining to freedom of speech in Germany are schizophrenic. On the one hand, Holocaust Denial – basically denying historical fact – is punishable by up to four years imprisonment. But printing the names of criminals convicted of a capital crime – stating a historical fact – is also evidently breaking the privacy laws. This is completely absurd. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it:
At stake is the integrity of history itself. If all publications have
to abide by the censorship laws of any and every jurisdiction just
because they are accessible over the global internet, then we will not
be able to believe what we read, whether about Falun Gong (censored by
China), the Thai king (censored under lèse majesté) or German
murders. Wikipedia appears ready to fight for write once, read anywhere
history, and EFF will be watching this fight closely.
