Thursday, February 21, 2008
The Wikileaks Injunction
A website operator, wikilinks.org, says it will defy a U.S. court's order and continue its practice of allowing the posting of documents in the Julius Baer bank case, in which the bank is accused of illegal business dealings. Julius Baer had obtained an injunction from a Swiss court, and the U.S. district court agreed to enforce it by ordering the domain name registrar to take the site offline. The website operator compares this action to the U. S. government's position in U. S. v. New York Times (the Pentagon Papers case), essentially claiming that the action is a prior restraint. Read more here. Here's a link to the injunction.
The problem in taking the entire site offline, as I see it, is that it also takes down other documents that have nothing to do with the Julius Baer case. On what theory can the judge limit access to those documents?
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/media_law_prof_blog/2008/02/a-website-opera.html