The Austrian regional power company TIWAG (based in Tirol) has claimed 500.000 euro in damages if an activist doesn't immediately take down a critical website. On 10 March they filed preliminary proceedings at the court of Innsbruck. On 23 March they sent another claim of 100.000 euro to the hosting provider of the site (based in Germany). TIWAG claims the information is confidential and the site a violation of their trademarks.
Austrian EDRI-member Quintessenz reports that two weeks ago, activist Markus Wilhelm published a list of 20 mainly American companies and banks with whom TIWAG allegedly closed cross-border leasing deals. The address of his website was www.dietiwag.at. But after a claim from TIWAG the national registrar of the Austrian top level domain deleted the domain name. Wilhelm then reopened his website at www.dietiwag.org. There is no national representative for the .org top level domain in Austria, since it is controlled by the international not-for-profit organisation PIR.org. On top of that, he hosted the site in Germany, not in Austria.
Austria has a history of power companies claiming reputation damage on the Internet. Earlier, the power company of Linz sued a group of radio broadcasting amateurs for publishing a critical document about the effects of the new 'Powerline Technology'. According to the radio amateurs, supported by all the leading broadcasting authorities and technicians in the country, introducing this outdated technology would make it impossible to receive important short wave transmissions from the BBC, Deutschlandfunk, Voice of Amerika, Radio Free Europe, the Red Cross and all kinds of amateur radio. The document was immediately mirrored worldwide and Linzstrom lost the case in court. Their claims however did lead to another fitting reward: the people's choice for the Austrian Big Brother Award 2004.
Zensur.at: 50 Hertz Mafia will 500ยท000 (in German, 25.03.2005)
http://www.quintessenz.at/cgi-bin/index?id=000100003194
Critical website
http://www.dietiwag.org
People's choice Austrian BBA 2004 (26.10.2004)
http://www.bigbrotherawards.at/2004/nominees/winners_en.php#publikum