The German version of the worldwide encyclopaedia Wikipedia was offline for three days, after a legal complaint filed by the parents of a hacker who's real name was mentioned online.
Tron was a German hacker and phreaker who found a controversial death in 1998. Amongst other things, Tron broke the security of the German phonecard by producing working clones. He was also known for his diploma thesis where he created the Cryptophon, which was one of the first public implementations of a telephone with built-in voice encryption.
The Berlin court issued a preliminary interdiction on 17 January against access to the German domain www.wikipedia.de, as a redirect to the German Wikipedia version.
The preliminary interdiction did forbid the redirect as long as the family name was online in the article at de.wikipedia.org. However, the public decision of German Wikipedia was to keep the name due the general policy not to interfere with the content of the Wikipedia Encyclopaedia at all.
For 3 days wikipedia.de was offline, but it was still possible to access the German contents through the .org address, hosted in the United States. .
The supporters of Tron's parents tried to solve the matter in an out-of-court settlement, but without success. They have raised questions regarding the conflict of handling personal data in an "open content" system and the fact that Wikipedia does not have a privacy policy in place.
A first decision in this matter will probably be taken at the beginning of February 2006.
Berlin court issues provisional order against the Wikimedia Foundation
(19.01.2006)
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Berlin_court_issues_provisional_order_agai...
German Wikipedia back up amid lawsuit (20.01.2006)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/technology/136...
Tron (hacker) - page on wikipedia.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_%28hacker%29
Some background material about this case (in German only)
http://www.ccc.de/~andy/CCC/TRON/wikipedia