Here's the story. Or at least most of it.
Some 19 years ago, a man in Germany, together with his half brother, reportedly murdered an actor named Walter Sedlmayr. The man was convicted and served 15 years in jail.
Now he is free. And, according to Wired, he has exercised that freedom by instructing lawyers, the elegantly named firm of Stopp and Stopp, to sue Wikipedia.
The lawsuit claims that German privacy law, designed to help criminals re-integrate into society, prevents the man being named in association with Walter Sedlmayr's murder.
Wired quotes Jennifer Granick from the Electronic Frontier Foundation as saying that the lawyers are not only demanding that publications change whatever they write now, but that online archives must endure revision, too.
In writing to Wikipedia, the lawyers offered a very interesting approach: "As your article deals with a local German public figure (such as the actor Walter Sedlmayr), we expect you are aware that you have to comply with applicable German law."
Well, gosh, perhaps not everyone realizes when they mention, say, Boris Becker or that interesting actress who was in the first of the Bourne movies, that one is subject to German law when one does so.
Geek.com quotes the Electronic Frontier Foundation as adding: "At stake is the integrity of history itself. If all publications have to abide by the censorship laws of any and every jurisdiction just because they are accessible over the global Internet, then we will not be able to believe what we read, whether about Falun Gong (censored by China), the Thai king (censored under lèse majesté) or German murders."
(Credit:
CC Schoschie/Flickr)
You might be wondering why I have not mentioned this German murderer's name. You see, as I write, I am reminded that the world seems to revel in the persona of murderers. In some slightly twisted way, they become figures of fascination.
I have a strange suspicion that the more the name of Walter Sedlmayr's murderer is mentioned, the more famous he will become. And the more famous he will become, the more money he might be able to make from the fame he claims not to desire.
So I am conducting a fame-reduction experiment. Moreover, I know that everyone who chooses to discover his name can do so in a myriad of ways.
I wonder how many people tried to access information about this man who murdered the German actor Walter Sedlmayr and how many people have done so in recent days.
I also wonder how Wikipedia will choose to respond to this interesting and rather revisionist-minded lawsuit. At the time of writing, the full names of both murderers are still there in the Wikipedia entry for Walter Sedlmayr.
However, the Wikipedia Administrators' noticeboard has a spirited discussion about all aspects of the case.
The solution proposed by a poster called Zara 1709 on the noticeboard is to "remove the full name from the article and the article talk page, but leave in the edit history of the article and the talk page. We would even have some sources that mention the full names in the reference, simply because they provide other, relevant information, too."
The precedent for this is the so-called Star Wars kid case, in which a 14-year-old Canadian boy waved around a golf-ball retriever like a lightsaber and then endured painful taunts, leading to an equally painful lawsuit.
Zara1709 noted that: "It is quite important to point out that, on Wikipedia, regard for people's privacy applies to criminals and former criminals, too."
However, another poster, Baseball Bugs, dissented: "There is no justification whatsoever for censoring the names of the killers. The notability argument is bogus, there is no privacy or BLP issue, and the 'doing harm' argument is crystal-ball and thus is irrelevant. And some anonymous German judge has no jurisdiction over Wikipedia."
In reading all this, I am left with the words that were often drubbed into me by teachers: "History is written by the winners."
So if this German request succeeds, might some consider that the winner is Wolfgang Wehrle, the man who, with his half brother Manfred Lauber, murdered Walter Sedlmayr 19 years ago? Dash it, I couldn't help myself. I hope I'm not causing undue work for some future editor.
Facebook seems to have contributed to countless broken love affairs, divorces, and insane levels of jealousy. People pry into your friend lists and updates until they sometimes reach conclusions far beyond reality. How lovely, then, that a mere status update appears to have saved a Harlem man from jail.
According to The New York Times, Rodney Bradford decided to update his status with a call from the soul. "Where's my pancakes?" is the Times' translation of a status update it says was written in "indecipherable street slang." The fact that Bradford did this at 11:49 a.m. on October 17, using his father's computer, meant that he would not have to suffer pancakes of a more distasteful nature in the local penitentiary.
(Credit:
CC Slushpup/Flickr)
Bradford, you see, was arrested the next day for robbery. However, after he was booked, his lawyer was intelligent enough to update the district attorney with news of Bradford's Facebooking.
A subpoena was swiftly flung the way of the Zuckerbergville crew so that they might reveal whether the timing and location of the update were correct. They were, meaning Bradford could update his criminal status to "cleared."
There are some, however, who are not entirely convinced the charges should have been dropped. Joseph Pollini, a teacher at the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice told the Times: "With a username and password, anyone can input data in a Facebook page."
He also offered a dire warning of the infinite dastardliness of people Bradford's age: "Some of the brightest people on the Internet are teenagers. They know the Internet better than a lot of people. Why? Because they use it all the time."
Oh, why is it so hard to give young people the benefit of the doubt--especially on Facebook?
France has adopted a strong antipiracy law, one that may mean those who chronically share unauthorized movies and music online will lose Web access for up to a year.
France's top constitutional court approved a revised plan to penalize those accused multiple times of infringing intellectual property, according to a report published Thursday in The New York Times.
In the spring, the court rejected an earlier version of the law.
Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, applauded the French court's decision.
"Today's decision is an enormous victory for creators everywhere," Glickman said. "It is our hope that ISPs will fully honor their promise to cooperate and that the French government will take the necessary measures to dedicate resources to handle the enormous task ahead."
Rick Cotton, executive vice president and general counsel at NBC Universal, said: "The French action recognizes that jobs and economic growth in creative industries are under assault by digital theft. We need a safe and secure Internet that enables consumers to access content easily but does not facilitate illegal file sharing that kills jobs in creative sectors."
Under the law, a new agency will be created that will issue termination notices to Internet service providers, and they will in turn cut off access to customers accused of piracy. But first, in cases where the agency wants to terminate service, it must first go through some kind of judicial review.
One of the ways the law was revised to gain acceptance by the French court is to require a judge to review each case before anyone's Internet access is shut down.
It's doubtful that a law like this could be adopted in the United States, at least at this point. Both the film and music industries have shied away from lobbying for a three-strikes law. But they have appealed to ISPs to voluntarily create what they refer to as a graduated-response program. This would call for the ISPs to issue warnings to chronic copyright offenders and potentially cut off service for those who refuse to comply.
There is yet another way that copyright owners could get ISPs to help in their antipiracy efforts, according to Gwen Hinze, international policy director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
She says the United States could agree to a three-strikes rule as part of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, being negotiated by legislators in the United States, Japan, the European Union, among others.
In this way, U.S. copyright owners could create a law without any public debate, Hinze said. She called any such attempt "policy laundering."
ACTA members are scheduled to gather again for more talks later this year.
Updated at 3 p.m. to include comments by Electronic Frontier Foundation.
There were those who believed that the creator of the "Should Obama Be Killed?" Facebook poll might be a sinister white supremacist out to cause world disruption.
Some were less convinced, as all the four potential answers to the poll--"Yes", "no", "Maybe" and "if he cuts my health care"--were spelled correctly.
Now, according to the Associated Press, the Secret Service, which quickly went into action to pay the poll's author a social call, has announced that no action will be taken against the creator. (A separate person, a poll software developer, came forward earlier this week and had what he described as a "friendly" talk with the Service.)
"Case closed," Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan told the AP. "I guess you could characterize it as a mistake."
It was mistake that appears to have been perpetrated by a juvenile who, presumably, thought it was, um, funny. The Service met with both the juvenile and his or her parents (no details about the person's identity are being revealed) and decided, perhaps, that a little grounding might be sufficient.
Still, it is worth considering just what developers and Facebook itself might do to get a slightly firmer grasp on alleged amusements posted on the social-networking site.
(Credit:
The Huffington Post)
A very swift wander around Facebook revealed to me a 145-member group entitled "All Traffic Wardens Should be Killed."
Another 34-member group is dubbed "Perez Hilton Should be Killed."
Other personalities who seem to be the object of Facebook death threats include soccer player Didier Drogba, as well as British pop group Take That.
"Twilight" star Robert Pattinson is the subject of a Facebook group called "Who Thinks Robert Pattinson Should be Killed?"
There is a 32-person group that should concern many readers--it certainly concerns me greatly--called "All Ex-boyfriends should be Killed."
And two groups, called "Everyone Should be Killed," seem to walk a tender line between equanimity and insanity.
In fact, if you perform the Facebook search for "should be killed," you get no less that 500 cheery, little groups.
So is this the time to mention Facebook's own terms of service reject all content that is "hateful" or "threatening"?
Facebook may have 300 million members, but a news story this week makes one particular member stand out from the crowd.
Jonathan G. Parker, 19, of Fort Loudoun, Pa., is alleged to have burgled a house of two diamond rings. However, according to the Journal of West Virginia, Parker is alleged to have done something of a highly modern nature during this burglary.
For the victim, examining her computer after the burglary, noticed that her computer was logged into someone else's Facebook account. This might seem strange in itself. However, the person who logged on (perhaps to update his status to "feeling lucky today"?) also seems not to have logged off. That led intrepid sleuths to the figure of Parker, whose Facebook page it is indeed alleged, was the one that lay open.
Parker has been charged with one count of having an impressive and excessive ego. I'm sorry, that's not quite right. He has been charged with one count of felony daytime burglary.
It would be churlish to suggest that our obsession with networking socially will get us into trouble. However, after a Florida case in which a man allegedly stole a laptop in order to check his Facebook page, shouldn't we really consider whether the Facebook habit might be leading some to difficult and damaging behavior?
Edited 1.20pmPST to include quotes from Indiana BMV's Deputy Communications Director
Sometimes he was Eric Nicholson. Sometimes he was Vernon Eugene Lyons.
However, according to authorities in Indiana, his real name was George Helms and he assumed at least 10 different names in that state alone.
According to CBS2 Chicago, Helms walked into the Hobart, Ind., license branch to obtain an 11th ID. No one seems really sure why he would want an 11th license.
What Helms appears not to have known is that Indiana has invested in new facial recognition software.
Helms allegedly had all the correct paperwork and then posed for his photograph. However, in the evening after his application was approved, the photograph passed through the new facial recognition system, which spotted an allegedly remarkable similarity with 10 other licenses, according to the report.
In an email, the bureau's Graig Lubsen told CNET that normal procedure is that: "The next morning, our investigators will examine all of the potential facial recognition conflicts and determine if an investigation should proceed."
He added: "In Mr. Helms case, we had already distributed BMV 'Wanted' posters of Helms and a variety of other people to all 140 license branches and the employee recognized Helms from the poster."
The Bureau of Motor Vehicles claims that Helms got four licenses between July 2000 and October 2001. And eight more October 2008 to February 2009, according to the report.
As the investigation has continued, it has spread to Illinois, where authorities believe Helms secured at least 15 other IDs.
He has been charged with seven counts of forgery and is currently in jail.
Google must be used to having its neutrality questioned by now. However, when the alleged home of neutrality comes after you, perhaps you wonder if all this questioning of your motives is ever going to stop.
Not so long ago, it was the Greeks who decided they weren't too happy with Street View's prying artificial eyes. Now, according to the Associated Press, it's the Swiss who are getting nervous about their much vaunted (and much-profited from) privacy.
Hanspeter Thuer, the federal data protection commissioner of Switzerland, accused Google of not doing enough to blur faces and license plates. And he demanded that "Google immediately take its Google Street View online service off the Internet."
Ah, Switzerland. I have no reason to believe the man on the bike is a member of Parliament.
(Credit: CC Robert Thomson/Flickr)A Google statement to the Associated Press said that the company would discuss the matter further with the authorities in order to "demonstrate our industry-leading applications for protecting the private sphere."
Perhaps the most interesting snippet of this governmental request is that it appears to coincide with the Swiss newspaper NZZ espying a member of Parliament, Ruedi Noser, on Street View in the company of a lady who was not his wife, but was, praise be, his assistant.
Noser's reaction was charming in the extreme: "There is probably no problem for my wife, as you could also recognize my companion in the picture." Somehow, the use of the word "probably" offers a hearteningly realistic view of humanity on the part of the Parliamentarian. I think he will go far with such a sanguine view of the world's workings.
Whenever countries in Europe raise objections such as these, it appears that Google finds an appropriately European solution: discussions and talks, followed, no doubt, by the parsing of a few nuances, until the issue seems to recede from the public eye.
Then the Google eye can happily go back to work.
Last week, a judge ordered Google to reveal the name of a blogger who may have defamed Vogue model Liskula Cohen. Now Rosemary Port, whose "Skanks in NYC" blog suggested Cohen was a "skank" and a "ho" among other potentially negative descriptions, is now turning a little of her "frank in NYC" wrath on Google.
You may be moved a little by Port's logic. Firstly, she told the New York Daily News that it was Cohen who caused all the fuss: "Before her suit, there were probably two hits on my Web site: One from me looking at it, and one from her looking at it (...) That was before it became a spectacle. I feel my right to privacy has been violated."
It is an interesting argument, one that perhaps suggests a future in the law, should a fashion career not satisfy.
And it seems that Port intends to test the boundaries of the law by attempting to sue Google. The 29-year-old student at the Fashion Institute of Technology told the Daily News that she will launch a $15 million suit against the entirely non-skanky company from the Left Coast (the blog was hosted on Google's Blogger).
"When I was being defended by attorneys for Google, I thought my right to privacy was being protected," she told the News.
However, once the judge made her order, things changed. "I would think that a multibillion dollar conglomerate would protect the rights of all its users," said Port. Her attorney, Salvatore Strazzullo, told the Daily News that Google "breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity."
Strazzullo will invoke the Founding Fathers in his argument, he said. And it is an interesting argument, one that perhaps extends beyond the blogs Google hosts to every area of personal information that the company holds. What should anyone who uses Google's services reasonably expect from the company in terms of privacy?
It will be more than a little pulsating to see where the courts might bang their gavels on this issue. But perhaps the saddest part of this strange episode is the reason why Port and Cohen allegedly fell out. According to the Daily News, Cohen said some not-so-nice things about Port to her ex-boyfriend. Oh, ladies. Is it really worth getting all this publicity, all this darned fame, over something that might have started as a little tittle-tattle?
In a week in which Google was ordered to reveal the identity of the "Skanks in NYC" blogger who may have defamed model Liskula Cohen, a landmark judgment was also reportedly reached in the United Kingdom.
In Worcester Magistrates Court of England, an 18-year-old woman was allegedly sent to three months in a young-offenders institute after being found guilty of posting death threats on Facebook, according to the Daily Mail. It's thought to be the country's first jail sentence for cyberbullying.
The young defendant allegedly wrote on her Facebook page that she would kill another young woman, the Daily Mail said. The two had been at school together, where the defendant's bullying of the victim allegedly began.
The defendant already had two previous convictions stemming from her bullying of the victim, one for assault and one for criminal damage.
According to the Mail's report, the defendant originally claimed the Facebook threat was written while drunk. However, police discovered that the threats remained on her Facebook page for 24 hours.
It is tempting to think of this case as an isolated and extreme incident. But, as has become increasingly clear, people tend to use social-networking sites to reveal just as much of their persona as they do in person.
Or, in some cases, even more.
I know that some people have pleasures that are not entirely innocent.
They go to sites such as What Would Tyler Durden Do? or Dlisted to read the occasionally besmirching remark aimed at those more famous, wealthy, and beautiful than themselves.
Sometimes, the bloggers behind these bastions of moral sure-footedness prefer to remain anonymous. However, a court ruling on Monday in New York might change that.
Liskula Cohen, a Vogue cover model, won an interesting case against the nameless blogger behind the erudite site Skanks in NYC.
Judge Joan Madden ruled that Cohen is entitled to know the identity of the blogger as phrases such as "psychotic, lying, whoring...skank" might possibly be defamatory.
Initially, Cohen sued in January, asking the court to order Google, which was host to the site on Blogger, to reveal its author's identity.
In this proceeding, the judge declared that Google must inform the blogger that he or she should probably get a lawyer, as there is a risk of unmasking.
The blogger's lawyer claimed that the views expressed were "hyperbole" and that blogs "have evolved as the modern-day soapbox for personal opinions."
The lawyer also offered the view that blogs have "mere venting purposes, affording the less outspoken a protected forum for voicing gripes, leveling invective, and ranting about anything at all."
I wasn't entirely aware of that.
And the judge seems to have looked somewhat askance at these arguments. Especially, it seems, when she saw that the hyperbolic comments were placed near somewhat-provocative pictures of the model.
Judge Madden declared that placing such epithets as "ho" and "skank" next to these images might create "a negative implication of sexual promiscuity."
It is not for me to say why anyone would wish to create a blog called Skanks in NYC (the blog was taken down in March).
However, it will be interesting to see, as this lawsuit progresses, just what implications it might create for those who choose to blog anonymously and call people rather rude things.
