Free speech vs. privacy: as courts around the world try to catch up to technology, Wikipedia finds itself caught between Germany's privacy laws and our first amendment.

• Author: Schwartz, John
• Position: TECHNOLOGY - Wolfgang Werle and Manfred Lauber

gruesome 20-year-old murder case has now sparked a legal battle in cyberspace. In 1990, the victim, an actor, was found in his bedroom in Munich, Germany, stabbed in the stomach and beaten in the head with a hammer. Wolfgang Werle and Manfred Lauber were convicted of the murder and sent to prison.

Now the killers are suing to force Wikipedia to forget them, claiming that the online encyclopedia's articles about them and the case violate their right to privacy.

The legal fight pits German privacy law against America's First Amendment, and raises difficult questions about how the law, in any country, applies to the Internet.

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German law allows the suppression of criminals' names in news accounts once they have paid their debt to society. On the other hand, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees every American's freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Alexander H. Stopp, a lawyer for the two Germans, says they should be allowed to "lead a life without being publicly stigmatized" for their crime. "A criminal has a right to privacy too, and a right to be left alone."

Werle, one of the killers, was released from prison in 2007, and Lauber, his half-brother, was released in 2008.

German publications have removed the killers' names from their online coverage. German editors of Wikipedia have scrubbed their names from the German-language version of the article about the victim, Walter Sedlmayr. The two killers are demanding, in lawsuits in German courts, that Wikipedia do the same with the English-language version of the article.

No way, say American free-speech advocates. Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer, says every Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court would agree that the Wikipedia article "is easily, comfortably protected by the First Amendment."

RENO V. A.C.L.U.

American courts have taken a hard line against attempts to regulate online speech. In 1997, the Supreme Court struck down portions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, in which Congress tried to regulate Internet pornography. That would have had the effect of censoring a lot of online content, and the ruling in the case, Reno v. ACLU., established that the Internet has the same First Amendment protections as traditional media.

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"The U.S. is not going to enforce laws from other countries that are inconsistent with our laws here," says Jennifer Granick, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a...