Two German men convicted for the murder of an actor in 1990 are suing the charity behind the online encyclopaedia ‘Wikipedia’; claiming that its inclusion of the details of their identities infringes their right to privacy. The legal fight pits German privacy laws against the US Constitution’s First Amendment which guarantees freedom of speech. According to Stopp, the lawyer representing the two men, German courts allow the suppression of a criminal’s name in news accounts once he/she has paid his debt to society. He added: “They should be able to go on and be resocialised, and lead a life without being publicly stigmatised” for their crime.

The two men were sentenced to life in prison in 1993 and were subsequently released in 2007 and 2008. Their lawyer has already successfully obtained the removal of the killers’ names from German publications, including from online coverage. German editors of Wikipedia have also removed their names from the German language version of the article about the victim, Walter Sedlmayr. Now the men are demanding that the Wikimedia Foundation, the American organisation that runs Wikipedia, do the same with the English version of the article.

In contrast to US courts, German courts strike a different balance between the right to privacy and the public’s right to know. Stopp has won a default judgment in a German court against Wikimedia, which held that the names and images of the killers could no longer be used in any publications regarding Sedlmayr’s death. Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer commented that “once you’re in the business of suppressing speech, the quest for more speech to suppress is endless.”

Wikimedia’s current policy is not to edit content at all unless it has received a court order from a court of a competent jurisdiction. It supports the choice of the English-language editors to include the names of the killers in the article. Wikimedia informed Stopp that it questioned the relevance of any judgments from the German courts, since it has no assets or operations in Germany.