Hubertus Albers again

Monday, May 21, 2007 at 5:17 | Posted in absurd, Freedom of speech, Germany, Legal | 3 Comments

There was an all time high in my blog statistics a couple of weeks ago. As my web connection was broken at the time and I therefore had a very limited access to the Internet, I had absolutely no idea why my two month old post about Atze Schröder a.k.a. Hubertus Albers was suddenly receiving loads of hits. While Atze Schröder is a very popular TV character in Germany, I thought that attempts of Hubertus Albers to get his name off the web were not such a big deal.

What I did not know is that the CEO of Wikimedia Deutschland e.V Arne Klempert had published a long post in his blog about legal actions taken by Mr. Hubertus Albers against him. Mr. Klempert appears as the admin-C of Wikipedia.de. The well known fact that the real name of Atze Schröder is Hubertus Albers was momentarily to be read in an article in the German Wikipedia.

In December 2006, Arne Klempert received a cease and desist letter from a lawyer representing Hubertus Albers. On advice of his counsel, Mr. Klempert refused to comply and was subsequently sued by Hubertus Albers. The case was scheduled for a first hearing in Hamburg in early May but just before the trial, Mr. Albers withdrew the lawsuit.

One would think that this would be a closed case as far as Arne Klempers is concerned. But what do you know, now Hubertus Albers is seeking his legal costs from Arne Klempert. As Mr Klempert writes, Mr. Albers was barking at the wrong tree in the first place and had a case with very questionable merits, to put it mildly. His legal team must have realized that they were wrong but they still want Mr. Klempert to pay for their own mistake.

As I wrote in March, there is a public record readily available in the web saying that Atze Schröder is a registered brand belonging to one Hubertus Albers in Emsdetten. Practically all Germany and anybody else who may be interested knows who the guy is. So suing everybody who may or may not have published his real name is a bad art of comedy.

via RA-Blog