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Politician Forces German Wikipedia Off the Net
Stephan Schulz writes "A German Member of parliament for a left-wing party, Lutz Heilmann, has obtained a preliminary injunction against the local chapter of the Wikimedia foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland e.V., forbidding the forwarding of the popular http://wikipedia.de to the proper http://de.wikipedia.org. Apparently Heilmann is not happy with the fact that his Wikipedia article (English version) contains information on his work for the former GDR Stasi, the much-hated internal secret service. Wikimedia Germany displays a page explaining the situation, and has announced that it will file an objection to get the injunction lifted. The German Wikipedia has more than 800,000 pages, and is hosted, like all Wikimedia projects, by the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation, and hence beyond the effective reach of at least German politicians and judges."
In principle, at least, it could happen in Britain if the truth were considered sufficiently defamatory. Unlike in America, the truth is not an absolute defense there against libel and if you can persuade a judge that you were defamed you can win a libel suit even if what was published was the plain, unembellished truth. If, let's say, you had photographic evidence of a politician cheating on his wife and put them up on the web, he could sue and the judge would probably end up ordering them taken down. I doubt that anybody would go this far, but there's nothing in their law to prevent it.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
With a name only 1 letter away from LULZ he's prime fodder for Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Ironically, the article about him says
There is currently no text in this page, you can search for this page title in other pages or edit this page.
IT'S CENSORSHIP! It's censorship I say!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Oh yay, let's all classify others on a simplistic and misleading two-dimensional political scale. Hey, at least it helps us from having to use our brains to comprehend the world around us.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Whether or not hate crimes are a wrongheaded concept is not an issue on which I have a strong stand.
However, it is possible to craft anti-hate laws which essentially make it harder to incite violence in code. For example, a campaign of hatred is mounted without explicit calls to violence, but with inciting of violence being its aims. Supporters of hate crimes who are both genuine and considered would be attempting to achieve a reduction in this type of activity.
I don't claim the existing hate crimes are well crafted. Most of the ones I've reviewed essentially step up penalties for existing actions when they are racially (or similar) motivated. Some say this is completely unreasonable, because it is about intention. However, we have different crimes for killing people depending upon various types of intention from no crime, through wrongful death and manslaughter up to first degree murder. It seems that a more insightful debate is required to convince me either way on hate crimes.
-josh