Wikipedia sued by German killers in privacy claim
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
On the one hand, you'll get no arguments against free speech or in favour of official censorship from me; go First Amendment, for sure. Likewise, it does not seem tenable to endorse the idea that someone who committed a crime can compel or mandate society to "forget" about it in all repositories of its institutional memory, including those which are created and maintained by private individuals in addition to governmental organisations.
On the other hand, having known and watched people who were incarcerated and rehabilitated attempt to reintegrate into society and lead normal, law-abiding lives and find jobs and housing fail because of the prejudices that arise against them on the basis of their having been convicted of a felony or whatnot, I can definitely appreciate the spirit of this law. To me it seems absolutely imperative that criminals - up to and including those guilty of capital crimes - be given a new lease on life, contingent upon the terms of their sentencing.
For the more conservative, law-and-order types among you who think this is a spineless bleeding-heart rant, I encourage you to contemplate for a moment what it's like to be in the shoes of someone who has committed a crime, experienced years or decades of imprisonment, whose will has been broken and whose remorse consumes them. As if they do not have enough of a burden to live with - and for far more criminals than you might think, it is a burden they excise with attempted suicide - society has conspired to ensure that it is so much more difficult for them to even meet the basic needs of livelihood.
Or consider the case of innumerable teenagers in the US - like the infamous Genarlow Wilson case here in Georgia - that fall prey to the criminalisation of their consensual sexual activity by retarded, ass-backward state laws and then experience a lifetime of stigmatisation by being placed for the rest of their life on the sex offender registries with which the American polity is so obsessively fixated.
My point is that the spirit of the law - that convicted criminals who have served their time have the right to be judged on their own terms subsequently without that cloud hanging over their head - deserves at least some intellectual consideration in this case. It certainly lends the issue some nuance that must be carefully weighed, even if you don't ultimately come down on the side of censorship.
It's precisely these kinds of draconian stances on prisoners' and criminals' rights arising from an overzealous, fanatical jurisprudential self-concept that give the US the record and reputation of being rather backward among "First World" nations. The human dimensions of the criminal element must be taken into account; just because someone committed a crime does not mean they are not a human being and do not deserve your thoughts and your empathy.
So you'll get different responses from ordinary people than you get from the legal entities, and these things have a way of finding an outlet. Just like you can't stop filesharing you can't stop the sharing of basic facts, if it happened and someone wants to get the word out there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop that.
And it has been like that for the last 15 years or so.
I've got exactly one example where it ended differently, and someone managed to successfully remove something from the internet in a more or less permanent fashion, but it involved some pretty drastic measure.
Here's a layperson's description of this German law (with the caveat that it comes from an extremely biased source):
Alexander Stopp, the lawyer for the two men, noted that Germany's courts allow a criminal's name to be withheld in news reports once they have served a prison term and a set period has expired.
This is the twenty-first century. There is no longer any such thing as a "news report", as distinct from a "history book", a "personal letter", or even a "word-of-mouth rumor". There was once a time when you could define, fairly objectively, what a "news report" was -- let's try this definition: "a piece of communications designed to be delivered to thousands or millions of people within a time period less than a month" -- but now that time is over. That definition is now rubbish. Anything I type here, anything I say out loud near a blogger, anything I write that comes into view of someone else's digital camera can be captured and distributed to the entire world, in much less than one day, for a price too cheap to meter. Anything that appears on the Internet, even if it is buried inside a dry Ph.D. thesis on a single web server in a locked basement on an isolated Pacific island, is one well-placed retweet away from becoming a "news report".
I wish I knew how else to solve the problem, but even if you believe that censorship was the answer before, it isn't any more. The German legal system is literally trying to enforce the world of 1984: One is legally required to delete or rewrite history after N years.
Now, imagine a world where you can find all the people retweeting 'illegal' information just as easilry as searching on Google and the cost of suing was just as marginal as retweeting itself. Maybe the system was aided by artificial intelligence (one of my college professors was researching the subject of application of AI in legal reasoning). That would change everything and I think this will happen sooner or later. (Sorry for my brevity, I was writing this from my phone)
This has always been so. Breaking the law is easy, convicting somebody isn't. Just look at serial killers.
There's alway people who scream about piracy and censorship and there are alway people who will supply it.
Cheap sheet musics. Banned books. Video tapes. Widespread British literature in America. Pirated poetry in Britain. The movie industry's move to California. The radio. Napster. Bittorrent.
Copyright law has alway been a privelleges of the monopolists. The pirates are simply people who produces and distribute despite the law.
All copyright and patent do is criminalizes the free production, distribution, and entrepeneurship in arts and the science for the alleged benefit of the public, authors, and inventors.
If ye try to criminalize a perfectly good pink act, it shall be a black act, and continues underground.
Also, please don't try to convince me about the morality of giving anyone a living. If an artist starve on the street and he refuse to find another, more fruitful occupation, than it shall be so. If customers do not wishes to buy arts, it shall be so that arts decases altogether.
The customers are kings. All the rages about "right to make a living" is moot when laid at the soverigns. All of prosperity depends on satisifying the customers' subjective preferences and all survival in a free market economy depends on satisfications of customers.
If no one is willing to pay for arts and games, why create it?
I'll give you "distribute", but "produces" is plain nonsense. If I copy a book to give it to a friend, I'm not "producing" it, I'm "distributing" it. The act of producing was the effort that went into writing it, editing it, typesetting it, etc.
I can't say I know what is the most correct way to integrate old media and new media. I can certainly say I'm in favor of keeping these mens' names unpublished if only that waspossible: their identities are known and can be looked up if needed but IMHO there's no need to have it readily available. I can, also certainly, say that this ideal is impossible on the internet: everything is readily available. And you can't control internet and you shouldn't, because beautiful things will get conceived when the internet is allowed to unravel freely.
Much else can't be said about the court case itself: different nations have different laws and there's no general solution to how two different jurisdictions merge. Germany certainly has no say about the US jurisdiction and US certainly can't enforce their free speech policy in foreing countries.
I assume the outcome is pretty random and I hope it doesn't set any significant precedents either way.
However, I don't think that the censorship legislation is an effective way to address this problem. I'm not convinced that legislation is a proper way to address it at all, but I think this legislation in particular is especially misguided, because it's dodging the whole question. It does not limit people's discriminatory actions, much less attitudes, against former criminals. It's not having been criminals that's the problem, it's people's reaction to it that's a problem. That's a social engineering issue, and this German law is a band-aid fix that tries to sweep the whole thing under the rug and call it a day.
The German law casts a discrimination issue as a privacy issue, and therefore misses the point. I side with the First Amendment on this one.
Oh really? So if you have kids, you're perfectly happy not knowing that you're living next to a pedophile?
> My point is that the spirit of the law - that convicted criminals who have served their time have the right to be judged on their own terms subsequently without that cloud hanging over their head - deserves at least some intellectual consideration in this case.
Yes it does. But it isn't the only point that deserves consideration. Past behavior is relevant, and the relevance is circumstance dependent. (If you don't have kids, living next to a pedophile may be no big deal.)
The best solution is likely to be accurate and useful information. (Note that all of the above poster's complaints are actually due to inaccurate or incomplete information.)
> just because someone committed a crime does not mean they are not a human being and do not deserve your thoughts and your empathy.
No one ever said tht they weren't a human being, but you don't have the right to decide who gets my thoughts and empathy. (Note that this has nothing to do with prison records.) Or rather, if you insist on trying to impose your decisions on me, you'll find that I can play that game too and I don't care whether you like the result.
I'm only willing to let you make the decisions that you prefer if I get the same consideration.
What would I do if my kids /were/ living next to a pedophile? Move? Lock them indoors 24/7? Burn the guy's house down? Ask him to move in next to someone else's kids instead of mine?
Knowing that my kids are living next to a pedophile would most likely just cause me needless stress.
Maybe I am and maybe I'm not. I'm strongly inclined to agree with foldr that it would be mostly pointless to know that and cause me unnecessary angst.
What I am sure of - and this was closer to the general thrust of my post - is that I don't need to know if my neighbour once had sex with his girlfriend in high school when, I don't know, say he was 18 and she was 16 (in states where age of consent is 18). In fact, there is absolutely no reason I should be mentally prejudiced against him as a "dangerous sex offender" and tell my kids to avoid like the plague on that basis. Yet that is exactly the kind of thing we do to people in this country.
Good for you. However, it's unclear why your choice, either way, should bind someone who'd rather choose the other.
> What I am sure of - and this was closer to the general thrust of my post - is that I don't need to know if my neighbour once had sex with his girlfriend in high school
Not so fast. You're using inaccurate/irrelevant knowledge to argue against having accurate knowledge. (That's why I used the word "pedophile" and not "sex offender".)
In this world, there's going to be knowledge. We can only affect how accurate it is.
The public sex offender lists were in part a reaction to semi-public lists. Which would you rather have?
I'm not trying to troll or flame or anything, I just feel that the punishment fits the crime. -> You kill an actor, you get fame. You don't like the fame? Don't kill the actor.
And I feel the first amendment should have priority over anyone's personal feelings anyways. =/
I don’t care how I feel about a certain punishment as long as it gets its job done. There are the least murders if you legalize murder (unlikely)? Fine, legalize it.
Sure, you might want to minimize or maximize other things. The happiness of the victims (or their family and friends). The happiness of the people reading or hearing about the punishments. But that feels rather superficial to me. I guess that’s a judgment call.
Now, we don’t really know whether this law actually gets the job done (and insofar, I am pretty split on this case) but at the very least, I have become quite careful when evaluating punishments (stripping certain rights to privacy away would be a punishment) with my feelings.
Man, I’m rambling :)
However, I found it oddly ironic that the punishment they got for killing an actor was fame, and they didn't want the fame, which I personally believe they deserved for murder. And I was expressing that they got what they deserved, imho.
(I view murder as rarely forgivable.)
That's not the punishment they got. They were given a prison sentence which lasted approx. 15 years. That's the punishment they got. The fame is a side effect.
But I guess what I mean is that the fame is pure karma which they shouldn't be allowed to rid themselves of because they committed murder. (I assume murder because "they were sentenced to life in prison.")
"Fame" is a way of society to hand out punishments outside of the courts of law. Such an extrajudicial punishment is especially annoying when there are mitigating circumstances. Usually those are details that courts bother with, but public opinion doesn't.
(Now, that doesn't mean this particular case is easy. Wikipedia also records history. History records the identity of many killers and I believe in a lot of cases that can be an important historical fact. Balancing rights rarely is easy, so I'm happy that we have independent professionals that spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.)
That's a defense of the spirit of the law, btw. In this case there's no doubt wikipedia should not be censored.
Basically, over here, when you've done your time in jail, you're done. Your debt to society is paid. Your status as a regular citizen is restored. And as such, you have some sort of right to be forgotten, you shouldn't have to be treated as an ex-con for the rest of your life.
In reality though, people do care about it, people are curious, people do treat ex-cons differently, there is a value attached to knowing if someone committed a crime or not. What these guys should have done is to ask to be removed quietly, and if it was denied, just forget about it and hope everyone else does it too. Bringing attention to it is the exact opposite of what they wanted.
The murderers' names are Manfred Lauber and Wolfgang Werlé. Let's hear it for the Streisand Effect.
I've seen this many times over now, someone sues to keep their privacy protected somehow and within minutes of the news hitting the wires there is an internet snowball referring to the Streisand effect achieving the exact opposite of what the lawsuit intended.
The question now becomes if the Streisand effect is unstoppable (and it seems it is) does that mean that there is now officially no recourse to have your privacy protected ? Does the fact that these two are convicted killers count against them ? Even if they served their time ?
Presumably after you've served your sentence you and society are past it, you should be able to get on with your life.
Interesting detail is that due to a similar effect Sedlmayr came to be famous in the first place.
You could change your name.
Not that this is a definitive solution -- it's obviously rather painful to have to change the entire rest of your identity, rather than simply filing off the offensive part. And (for example), it won't get you off the sex offender registries that have proliferated in the USA, because you'll get arrested if you don't update the registry with your new name. But it would certainly be more practical than trying to "remove a drop of food coloring from a swimming pool", to steal Doctorow's metaphor.
Changing your name is not just some paperwork, there is a pretty strong psychological aspect to that.
Our built-in reputation heuristics don't function correctly when our memories are so wonderfully enhanced by technology. I look forward to the days of disposable identities and the Friends of Privacy. Or genetic screening against being a dick.
There's no such disagreement. Of course the German law doesn't trump US law in US jurisdiction. I checked the wikipedia discussion and the best argument I found for removing the names in the English version amounts to:
Since they are not notable, respect for their privacy would demand that their full names are left out. Since they went to court with this, the perpetrators have made clear that they would like to keep their privacy. Since Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, and not a forum for public shaming, their full names should be removed.
I still can't agree with this but it makes more sense than simply caving to the German law.