Family reunion in court « More shameless remarks by Larko

Family reunion in court

Monday, July 24, 2006 at 7:28 | In Freedom of speech, Germany, Legal, censorship, internet | 2 Comments

If you happen to be anywhere near Heilbronn in Germany on Wednesday 26th July 2006, you may want to visit the public gallery of the 6th Civil Chamber of the local court, Wilhelmstrasse 8, at 11 o’clock in the morning. Chances are that you would see a good piece of entertainment as members (father, son and daughter) of the stinking rich Fischer family meet up to discuss whether or not the daughter, Mrs. Margot Fischer-Weber, has used expressions like sharks, pig and wolf about her father Artur Fischer and her brother Klaus Fischer.

The lawsuite (page 1 and 2) seeks a court order that would ban Mrs. Fischer-Weber to use such expressions in public. She would also be forbidden to present her father and brother as idiots. In addition to that, the court will hear arguments about a real estate transaction and circumstances under which Mrs. Fischer-Weber signed a notarial document giving up her inheritance rights to the family assets.

The case was supposed to be heard on Thursday 20th July but was postponed by the presiding judge Hartmann because Klaus Fischer could not make it then. Judge Hartman wrote in the original summon that Mrs. Fischer-Weber’s web site title “Sharks and other Fis(c)h(er)” is questionable to motivate a court order. The judge also noted that caricatures featuring a pig, a wolf and a fox do not seem to suggest to any particular persons.

This may indicate that at least that part of the lawsuite will have a slim chance of success. The stakes are nevertheless very high. The suite seeks a fine of 250.000 € or an imprisonment of up to six months in case Mrs. Fischer-Weber should violate a possible court order.

Marcel Bartels makes two good points in his blog. The most certain way to draw attention to any web site would be suing the owner of the site to get it off line. The case has already been covered by several German blogs that would hardly have paid much notice to www.fischerfratze.de without this lawsuite.

Marcel’s second point is a good question. Whom would the Fischer family sue if the site were to appear anonymously in a server outside German jurisdiction? As the recent developments in India have demonstrated, any attempt to censor the Internet is bound to bring a lot of bad publicity and very little success.

2 Comments »

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Thank you for this. Just what I was looking for. Malzeit…
-tgs-

Comment by worstwriter — Monday, July 24, 2006 #
You were looking for another episode of “The bold and the beautiful”?

Comment by Larko — Monday, July 24, 2006 #