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German Killers Sue Wikipedia To Remove Their Names
Jason Levine writes "Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber killed a German actor in 1990. Now that they are out of prison, German law states that they can't be referred to by name in relation to the killings. Therefore, they have sued to get Wikipedia to remove their names from the Wikipedia article about the killings. The German edition of Wikipedia has already complied, but the English edition is citing US freedom of speech and a lack of presence in Germany as reasons why they don't need to remove the name. In a bit of irony, their lawyer e-mailed the NY Times: 'In the spirit of this discussion, I trust that you will not mention my clients' names in your article.'"
You just referenced their names in relation to the killings.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
That these guys killed someone and were convicted of it is a recorded, historical fact. No allegations, simple fact.
Are we not allowed to state simple facts now?
Just so that we don't forget the names of Wolfgang Werlé & Manfred Lauber, convicted killers. I would like to mention that the names of the killers are Wolfgang Werlé & Manfred Lauber. If they, Wolfgang Werlé & Manfred Lauber, don't like it they (Wolfgang Werlé & Manfred Lauber ) can sue me.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Less Hasselhoff, more Streisand.
1. make an article about each of them.
-do not mention the murders
-mention everything else about their life
-like the fact that they sued wikipedia
-mention the fact that you cant talk about what they did thanks to german law
-link to the german law involved
2. make an article about the murders.
-mention that the killers got out of prison
-mention what year they got out
-mention everything about them except their names
-you could even make up fake names, like 'Famous Actor Case Convict X' and 'Famous Actor Case Convict Y',
in other words.... you push that law right up to the point where it is about to break. but you dont beak it. smart readers can fill in the blanks, and most readers ae smart
Are you trolling or just brainwashed? This is why the Internet (which is not under US control at the moment) should not be under any single country's control. If it were under US control, you could watch the gambling sites and anything else politically expedient disappear.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Oh REALLY?
Explain the PATRIOT act to me?
While the American constitution undeniably is what you say it is, the past 20 years has not been kind to America!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber are killers. Nothing can whitewash that.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Wouldn't it be much more effective if the internet was not under the control of any one country? If instead it was a network of computers spread throughout the entire world....oh wait. Nevermind.
I'm sure a lot of people are going to come out against the position of Germany's culture on this, citing freedom of speech. Freedom of speech, in the United States at least, is not given to citizens so that they can harm other people's reputations or hold them accountable for their actions. It is there so that actions by the government can be openly criticized and constructive dialog be established between (and amongst) citizens and the government, without fear of reprisal. It is there for the betterment of everyone. If there is no benefit to society, no protection is granted.
These people have served their sentences. They have been punished according to the law of their land, and then released. In this country, a person's criminal record haunts them for life -- denying them jobs, restricting their freedoms, and in some cases leading to a greatly diminished quality of life such that they are forced into criminal enterprise in order to meet basic needs. But in Germany, these laws are crafted so that people can have a chance at a normal life again--A chance at redemption. It is recognized that people make mistakes, but these mistakes shouldn't haunt them for the rest of their lives. The government has stepped in to ensure that any adult citizen that has their freedom also has the same chances as the next.
As far as the internet -- do we really want it to be a tool that enables a person's past mistakes to haunt them forever? That any personal information, once released into it, somehow becomes public property? Those naked photos your boyfriend took of you when you thought you'd be with him forever -- are those public property once he breaks up with you and posts them online? How about the records of your divorce, or the reasons why you were fired? What about that one night when your best friend tried to walk out of the bar drunk, and you stole the car keys and the two of you got into a big fight and the police were called? You want the whole world to know about these things? Or--was it just a mistake and once amends have been made then that's the end of it?
Just because the information is out there doesn't mean it should be. Information doesn't have rights -- people do.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It states:
The question of excising names from archives has not yet been resolved by the German courts, he said.
There is no such concept as precedence in the German law. Every judge and every court is free to decide based solely on the current law and the merits of the case. There is something called prevailing opinion, but this is not obligatory, it is rather used as a shortcut by judges to reach a decision.
Only decisions by the highest courts (BVG = Federal Constitutional Court and BGH = Federal Court of Justice) are binding.
Do you really believe that? It's easy for the United States to be all indignant when it comes to German killers. But what do you think will happen when, say, the RIAA/MPAA lobbies to have domain names such as thepiratebay.org preemptively revoked?
Germany need to have a say in how DNS is run, as does the United States, England, France, Russia, China, and all the other nations of the world. Does Germany want x blocked or removed? Too damn bad, Swaziland vetoed them. Does the U.S. want that pesky torrent tracker site blown away? Too damn bad, Antigua says it stays. Everybody wins.
Having one nation in control of who gets to have a voice sucks, no matter which nation it is or how much they profess to love freedom of speech (while simultaneously making it harder and harder to enjoy that "freedom").
How many times must slashdotters tell these people how the World works ?
These people have not been part of the "world" (or society) for about 20 years. And yeah I know that prison is part of the world and society, but they totally missed the whole internet thing, so it's not surprising that they think this can be done. On the other hand, his lawyers should have adviced them better.
maybe time to register:
wolfgangwerleandmanfredlaubermurderedayoungactorin1990.com
Curious if you could register the .de counterpart.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Shouldn't you respect a countries laws weather you agree with them or not,
So if a law against something exists, anywhere on the planet, everyone should follow it? I'm pretty sure you don't want the world to adhere to Saudi Arabian, Singaporean, or North Korean laws. And I'm pretty sure they wouldn't want to adhere to Western laws.
Wikipedia should ban people for being murderers like Something Awful does
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Andrew_Allred#Public_Reactions
Also I just permabanned this guy because he murdered two people: http://forums.somethingawful.com/member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=84611
Now the question I have here is that, in the rules, it doesn't explicitly state you will be permabanned or punished in any way if you murder people. Does this make the user terms of conditions unclear?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Silliness. Court records, including the names of the parties involved, are sealed all the time in the US, for a variety of reasons. Germany simply has a different set of reasons than the US does. (In the US those reasons generally involve money, while in Germany they involve blood; this should come as a surprise to nobody.) If you think any one country, including the US, is going to do an adequate job preserving freedom of speech online, you're deluding yourself.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Your post is a good example of why that German law was passed in the first place.
The Werlé-Lauber effect sounds like something physics students would have to memorize an equation for.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
You know, I admit I am biased. I don't like murderers like Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber, because their victims have no recourse, ever again. And while I do believe that some of them can change and not be a threat to other people again, that doesn't mean that the past didn't happen. Forgiveness yes, whitewash the past, fuck no!
Murderers should very well learn to live with the consequences of their actions, because their actions have consequences that can never be rectified.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Or maybe you and GPP just aren't smart enough to see the irony.
The American lawyer dealing with this is named Godwin. Surely you get the irony in that, if nothing else.
"Ironic" was a stupid song, but the stupidity of the reaction to it is far greater. Every use of the word "ironic" is now a red flag for every would-be pedant who isn't nearly as smart as he thinks he is.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I hereby demand that the names of all involved countries be removed from the WWII wikipedia article!
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
The _murderer's_ rights aren't violated by people knowing what they did. They should have been executed anyways. But irrelevant of that, non-aggressive people also have the right of freedom of association. I for one choose not to associate with people I consider dangerous.
In a free society, criminals would owe restitution to their victims, and victims would be also entitled to request retribution against the criminal. Then people at large could make their own associative or dis-associative decisions regarding the criminal.
One thing is clear, however. It doesn't violate anyone's rights for other people to know information about them that they've made publicly available through their actions.
Note that I'm not saying I have, per se, the right to know information about other people. That would imply positive obligations on the part of other people. However, no-one has the right to stop the various people at Wikipedia from recording and maintaining an account of history. That is their private property right.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
A young man is walking through a small village one day and decides to stop by a bar and have a beer. He walks into a bar, and sees a grizzled old man, crying into his beer. Curious, the young man sits down and says, "Hey old timer, why the long face?"
The old man looks at him and points out the window, "See that dock out there? I built that dock with my own two hands, plank by plank, nail by nail, but do they call me McGregor the dockbuilder? No, no."
The old man continued, "And see that ship out there? I've been fishing these waters for my village for 35 years! But do they call me McGregor the fisherman? No, no."
The old man continued, "And see all the crops in the farms out there? I planted and have been farming those crops for my village for nearly 45 years! But do they call me McGregor the farmer? No, no."
The old man starts to cry again, "But you fuck one goat..."
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The American lawyer dealing with this is named Godwin. Surely you get the irony in that, if nothing else.
The American lawyer dealing with this is, in fact, the same Mike Godwin who created Godwin's law.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Enough with the goddamn excuse culture. You want respect, you earn respect. You want a second chance, then PROVE you deserve it first.
These guys killed someone and now they want the world to pretend it has never happened. Does NOT happen.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is fascinating -- when the United States [frequently] seeks to have its laws apply beyond its borders [extraterritoriality], everyone particularly the EU objects reflexively: "How dare they? We're a separate society."
Now some in the EU think its laws should apply to the US. And not just about this, also other issues. Why should anyone in the US, and particularly elements of the [deservedly] much-abused US government give a rats @$$ for such blatant hypocrisy? Surely no-one denies the US is a distinct society!
These gentlemen were declared perpetrators of a crime a few years ago, hence their sentence for a crime which shall be unspecified, yet the crime DID decrease the population by one, if that detail interests you.
And what were the names of these gentlemen?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
I was thinking along the same lines. Not that I'm trying to evoke Godwin's Law, but would it be illegal to refer to Hitler by name in relation to the murder of millions of people? How about Himmler, Goebbels, or the rest of that lot?
I'm sure a lot of people will agree with what you say, but that doesn't necessarily make it right. If we knew the solution for crime, crime wouldn't exist. What you are presenting are philosophical arguments mostly, without any objective studies showing they are effective.
Many people would say that a murder is never "paid up", so the criminal should never be forgotten. After all, if he did commit a murder once, what is to guarantee he will never do so again? Who can say the criminal is ever "cured"?
There's nothing irrational or unfair about people wanting protection from criminals. As long as no one can be sure that the criminal will not commit other crimes, and as long as recidivism among "cured" criminals is so high, we, the honest people, have the right to know who are the people most likely to commit crimes against us.
I don't see it that way, I don't worry about retribution, I don't think crimes like murders can ever be "paid", no matter what is done to the criminal. It's preventing further crimes I'm worried about.
Sure, jail isn't perfect, but it's an effective way to keep criminals isolated until they learn how stupid it is to be a criminal. You can argue that it's inhuman, but if someone must suffer, let the criminals suffer, not the innocent who are outside.
No, blatantly misrepresenting the concept of freedom of speech in the US, arguing for censorship of the information in the US on the basis of German laws, and making an extremely dishonest comparison between the release of private information like pictures of yourself naked and public information like that you fucking murdered someone is flamebait. The only thing sad here is that you think you actually have a proper argument.
That story/joke sums it up quite well: When you do things right, no one remembers... do things wrong, no one forgets.
Most people are not enlightened enough to make the distinction between "did a bad thing" and "is a bad person", and give em a chance to get on with their lives. Sturgeon's Law applies to the human race, also.
I think we know how this one's going to turn out for our convicted murderers, [redacted] and [redacted].
Their victims ARE dead, not were dead or have been dead.
********************
I object to Intellect without Discipline.
Actually, no. They story shows the finality of the action. If you murder, you will always be a murderer because there is no way to undo it. If you build a dock, it does not necessarily mean you are a dockbuilder. I've done some plumbing and in no way am I a plumber, and I was nowhere near that goat.
If you happen to commit one murder, and the penalty is the same as for 100 murders, you would be correct in finding it logically desirable to kill every potential witness and their family for good measure, instead of stopping at one victim.
Just look at what's censored from American TV! Spike TV, "the network for men", can't even broadcast "God damn it" or "asshole", as if their UFC audience would be offended!
Any claim that Americans are the worldwide guardians of free speech is an epic fail.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Does it require that we go around the world with a black marker redacting their names from all those printed newspapers from before they serve their time? How would you like to make everyone just "forget" as well?
I suppose I understand Germany's position: they did their time, you aren't allowed to punish them more, but just *change their actual names*. It would be *much* easier than trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
LOL...how can you ever know that?
I'd rather trust the opinion of the judge (and possibly the jury) who gave them 19 years, and not life sentence, over that of a crazy mob with pitchforks.
Unfortunately, the mob is still there, which is why laws like this one have some purpose.