Wikipedia.de: Routing around the German Court's Attempt at Censorship. *UPDATED*

UPDATE: The Associated Press Story that started this was wrong. - Thanks to Jon for correcting me in the comments and giving the details.

Further details in a fresher post.

Keeping it around for transparency. :-)
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There was a sickening thud when I checked my email. The German version of the Wikipedia has been taken down by court order - the details:

...Earlier this week, a judge at the Berlin-Charlottenburg administrative court sided with the family of the hacker known as Tron and ruled that the Web site www.wikipedia.de be taken down until the offending content is removed.

Tron, who spent many of his teen years hacking, developed working clones of German phone cards, among other things. He was sentenced to 15 months in jail for theft of a public phone, but the sentence was later suspended on probation, according to the Wikipedia entry.

In 1998, he died under mysterious circumstances.

Visitors to Wikipedia's German site are currently informed that it has been taken offline following a provisional court order...

...The fact that the Tron entry is still accessible shows how difficult it is for a court to order content to be removed from the Internet...

Indeed. That's a bit of hubris there on the part of the German Court, I think. I could understand an injunction against a page, but practically censoring an entire site is something that isn't conducive to freedom of speech. And what's the deal about the full name being published?

Some more digging:

... Tron’s real name was Boris Floricic, who was a German hacker and phone phreaker. He was sentenced to 15 months in jail for the theft of a public phone. He died in 1998 of hanging in a Berlin park.

Officially, the cause of Tron’s death was suicide. Many family members, media, and fellow hackers believed that he did not commit suicide, but was murdered. Some speculate that his activities may have crossed paths with organized crime members or intelligence agencies. They point to these figures as the murderers.

His family does not wish Tron’s full name to be used in print, and German newspapers call him “Boris F.” His parents obtained a temporary restraining order against the Wikimedia Foundation due to Wikipedia using his full name online...

Seems to me like the whole plan to keep Boris F's name from being printed just backfired. Welcome to the rest of the globe, courtesy of the internet. A comment here says that this is only an injunction and that litigation is continuing.

What is interesting is that since the Wikipedia is open content, there's an issue here that the German Court didn't even think about: A mirror of the site could easily go up.

It just goes to show that even though globalization is taking place, the growing pains are still being made felt. A court in one part of the world cannot control the information of the globe. Unless, possibly, it's a United States court...

At the core of this, I understand that the family doesn't want the name in print. Still, there are many things in this world that cannot be controlled - information increasingly so. As John Perry Barlow said:

The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.

Like water, information finds the easiest path.