A Berlin court Thursday rejected a lawsuit filed by the parents of a dead hacker who sought to keep a German Web site from linking to material in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia that contained the full name of their son.
The parents of the German hacker known as "Tron" had argued that the disclosure of their son's full name was a violation of their privacy. The court rejected the argument, however, without immediately giving its reasons.
It was not immediately clear whether the family would appeal the ruling.
Last month, a Berlin court ordered the German site, wikipedia.de, to drop its link to the German-language version of Wikipedia, temporarily siding with the family's claims that disclosure of the hacker's name violated Germany privacy laws.
But the ruling Thursday negated the earlier order, said Thorsten Feldmann, a lawyer for Wikimedia Deutschland, which is separate from the U.S.-based Wikimedia Foundation that publishes Wikipedia.
"Now, the court said it is allowed to redirect because there is no violation of privacy," he said. "The preliminary injunction has been nullified. It's legal to include Tron's real name on the Web site."
Tron's name is listed on both the English and German versions of Wikipedia as Boris Floricic. He was found hanged in a park in 1998.
Wikipedia, which boasts 3.7 million articles in 200 languages, is a free site and allows anyone _ amateur or professional, expert or novice _ to submit and edit entries. That open format has led to recent scrutiny of the site's credibility.
