Icelandic Court Rules: Wikileaks Will Get Contributed Credit Card Money

New submitter mordur writes "An Icelandic District Court has ordered the payment processing company Valitor to immediately reopen the merchant account (Icelandic original) of DataCell and start processing credit card payments for the Wikileaks organization. Noncompliance on behalf of Valitor will result in daily fines of ISK 800.000 (approx. USD 60.000). Under pressure from the USA based international credit card companies, Valitor stopped all service to DataCell, and thus to Wikileaks, just hours after having started processing payment in July 2011. The court found that Valitor had failed to prove that the processing of payments for Wikileaks was contrary to the business policies of the international credit card companies, nor had the company proved that DataCell was in breach of the service agreement between the companies by serving Wikileaks."

Comments

Good decision by Icelandic court

[ACTA sucks]

European countries always seem to have the most common sense in their rulings. USA is out of reality and Asia keeps to their own stuff. EU shines.

I think we should let the US companies and government to know that they can't do shit like this to us Europeans by banning Visa, Mastercard and Google from operating in Europe. Remember, we do have our own credit card processing networks too - lets use them instead. That way your privacy is better too, as your data isn't handed to US companies and therefore US government has no access to them.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Maquis196]

Well it's not all milk and honey over here. Our airlines ARE supposed to give data to the US government if the airline has anything to do with America. I'm in the UK and were bow down to most US requests for people or information.

Iceland isn't EU (although they are attempting to join afaik), they just happen to be an awesome country that seems to care about such things. They must have been doing a good job, my goverment called them terrorists once for letting their banks fail (oh no, not the banks!).

This might have been feeding a troll but wanted to set a small record straight :)

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah the bank thing was hilarious.

"We demand the government reimburse us for the money held in failed Icelandic banks!"

"Why? the debt was not backed by the full faith and credence of the government; that's why the interest rates were so high"

"HERP DERP I DON'T CARE GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY!"

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[ceoyoyo]

A bunch of banks that happened to be in Iceland, but not backed by the government, made some promises they couldn't keep. A lot of people, mostly in the UK, fell for those promises, and when everything went belly up they demanded that the Icelanders make good on them, which would have essentially bankrupted the country. The Icelanders felt that wasn't fair, and had the wherewithal to tell the banks, the investors, and the countries that were backing them, to go to hell.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[shentino]

There's nothing wrong with backing banks as long as all we do is keep them from taking their depositors down with them.

The problem with the US system is that we prop up zombies that don't deserve to stay in business.

But protecting innocent depositors is a good thing.

Iceland, for the win

[circletimessquare]

The 2008 crisis hacked them worse than the USA and Europe. Now, 4 years later, they are riding high, and Europe and the USA are still muddling through. How? Why?

For a country that four years ago plunged into a financial abyss so deep it all but shut down overnight, Iceland seems to be doing surprisingly well.

It has repaid, early, many of the international loans that kept it afloat. Unemployment is hovering around 6 percent, and falling. And while much of Europe is struggling to pull itself out of the recessionary swamp, Iceland’s economy is expected to grow by 2.8 percent this year. ...

But during the crisis, the country did many things different from its European counterparts. It let its three largest banks fail, instead of bailing them out. It ensured that domestic depositors got their money back and gave debt relief to struggling homeowners and to businesses facing bankruptcy.

“Taking down a company with positive cash flow but negative equity would in the given circumstances have a domino effect, causing otherwise sound companies to collapse,” said Thorolfur Matthiasson, an economics professor at the University of Iceland. “Forgiving debt under those circumstances can be profitable for the financial institutions and help the economy and reduce unemployment as well.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/world/europe/icelands-economy-is-mending-amid-europes-malaise.html?pagewanted=all

We, in Europe, and the USA, have much to learn from Iceland about how to survive a crippling financial crisis.