German Actor Til Schweiger shuts down 21 Websites
Via his lawyers "Kanzlei Eisenberg Berlin" German Actor Til Schweiger has gained a court injunction against ucrony.net to surpress a blog article dealing with a paintball attack on his house in Berlin.
Til Schweiger, who achieved some sort of fame for his comedies in the nineties, disliked an article on the multi-language Blog http://directactionde.ucrony.net and subsequently his lawyers served a court injunction ( Landgericht Berlin Geschäftsnummer 27 O 265/13 ) to ucrony's domain registrar domaindiscount24 ( aka Key Systems ), demanding from the registrar to block access the the blog article which mentioned Schweigers address.
Immediatly afterwords Domaindiscount24 disabled the complete Top-Level-Domain. Schweiger's lawyer also threaten ucrony.net with further legal action and explicitely forbid "any use of the legal documents for publication".
Ucrony.net is a loose collective of people who offer subdomains to many non-commercial projects in several countries, including photographers, musicians and bloggers, one of them http://directactionde.ucrony.net .
Due to the total closure of the domain by the registrar, all of those websites, blogs, email and mailinglists are affected
Ucrony.net and the plentyfact collective ( http://plentyfact.net ) , who offers technical support to ucrony , protest against this attack on freedom of speech. The closure of 12 websites because of one disputed article seems to reach a new level of legal intervention. Schweiger's lawyer do not indicate which German law the blog has violated, neither do they specify why a US-based blog is affected by german law. The attempt by Schweiger's lawyers to prohibit a publication of the case is nothing less the scandalous.
A spokesperson for plentyfact said: "To use domain registrars to get rid of unwanted content is out of proportion. Nobody expects the websites of German newspapers Bildzeitung or FAZ to go offline because somebody does not agree with an article. The attempt keep that case silent is unacceptable."
A London based DJ, who's website is affected by the closure of the domain, as well as other local initiatives currently consider legal action against Schweiger.
Contakt: ucrony@riseup.net
Full Statement of the plentyfact collective: http://plentyfact.net
6 May 2013