Legal Victory In Germany Protects The Wikimedia Projects And Volunteers From “forum Shopping”

The Wikimedia Foundation has won a legal victory in Germany’s courts, which dismissed a case from a wealthy and influential Pakistani citizen. Shoaib Ahmed Shaikh tried unsuccessfully to sue the Foundation under Germany’s notorious defamation, privacy, data protection, and “moral rights” laws. This lawsuit sets a precedent for protecting the Wikimedia projects and volunteers who contribute to their accuracy and reliability, and helping ensure that people around the world cannot “forum shop”—choose a court in a jurisdiction whose laws might be more favorable to them—simply because Wikipedia is accessible globally.

The Wikimedia Foundation is happy to announce that we have secured a legal victory in a court case in Germany. A Pakistani citizen, Shoaib Ahmed Shaikh, started the lawsuit, allegedly concerned about the content in Wikipedia articles about him and companies he was associated with: Axact and BOL Network.

Even though the Wikipedia articles were written in English, and hosted by the Foundation in the United States, Shaikh has a history of threatening the Wikimedia projects from different jurisdictions around the world. He first convinced the Pakistani Telecommunications Authority (PTA) to send us a cease and desist letter. He later used a Dubai-based holding company that employed a law firm in Germany to send us a second cease and desist. They invoked an inapplicable German “online safety” law, as well as German privacy, defamation, and slander laws, to threaten us in case we failed to comply, with: global “deletion/defunction” of Wikipedia; imprisonment of senior Foundation staff; and/or debt claims against Foundation staff.

His Pakistani media company (i.e., BOL Network) rented what appeared to be a “virtual” office—a rented coworking space or shared mailbox—in Berlin. Shaikh then hired yet another German law firm to actually begin a lawsuit against us in the capital. 

Fortunately, this other attempt to “forum shop” was also unsuccessful: after legal proceedings that lasted from May 2023 to October 2024, the Berlin court rightly dismissed his case on jurisdiction grounds. In November 2024, Shaikh decided not to appeal. 

“Forum shopping”: Taking advantage of legal systems worldwide

“Forum shopping” is a more-common-than-expected legal practice. Basically, it is carried out by people with significant wealth and/or experience using different legal systems and jurisdictions to their advantage. They look through the laws of countries to try to start lawsuits wherever they might have advantages or wherever the organization, persons, or person that they are suing might face disadvantages and/or high legal costs.

In the case of individual Wikimedia volunteers, the intention of forum shopping might be to expose them to undue risk: Some countries have lax civil procedures that expose the Foundation to unjustified user data disclosure requests, abusing volunteers’ privacy.

When “forum shopping” is done in relation to defamation cases, it is sometimes called “libel tourism.” In countries like Brazil, France, Germany, and India, some plaintiffs even use the local criminal law system to get law enforcement to launch investigations into “crimes” like defamation, “insult” or “online harassment.” This enables them to avoid suing the Foundation or Wikimedia volunteers in the civil courts of their home countries or in the United States, where the Foundation is headquartered.

A legal precedent defending the Wikimedia projects and volunteers against forum shopping

Germany has developed a notable reputation for pro-plaintiff privacy and defamation laws, including after a 2018 ruling from the same Berlin civil courts that Shaikh chose for his 2023 lawsuit against the Foundation. The German legal system is seen as setting particularly high expectations of care by volunteers writing Wikipedia articles about individuals, companies, and their owners.

Shaikh, when bringing his Berlin lawsuit against the Foundation, unsurprisingly invoked the same Berlin court’s disappointing 2018 ruling against us. He argued that English Wikipedia was accessible in Germany, and that he had business interests in the country: as mentioned above, the BOL Network media group had hired a small workspace or mail forwarding service in Germany, and said that its video channels had some German viewers. However, the court found that this was not good enough a legal argument. First, the article content had nothing to do with Germany and, second, the court found that Shaikh had neither his main residence nor the focus of his life in Germany, making it clear that it was an inappropriate jurisdiction for his lawsuit. 

Conclusions

We are very happy with this result! Although it was already quite onerous to obtain (consider that just one of our defense filings was 85 pages long, and included over 100 supporting exhibits), this legal result protected the work of Wikipedia users without any need for an even longer trial. This legal precedent also helps to protect against future cases, reaffirming that people cannot sue the Foundation and/or Wikimedia volunteers from anywhere in the world simply because Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects can be read from anywhere in the globe. The court’s decision helps protect the Wikimedia movement from always having to fear being held liable under the strictest laws globally, regardless of topic, language, and/or relevance.

For a long time, the Foundation has warned that unduly high publishing standards and privacy expectations will suppress legitimate encyclopedic activity, free speech, and access to knowledge. We hope that our recent legal wins, such as this one, are helping to restore the balance. Even so, countries like France, Germany, and India still seem to be highly attractive for litigants trying to control Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects using the legal system, rather than properly using the projects’ own dispute resolution systems, such as Wikipedia’s own numerous and highly effective systems for requesting changes to the encyclopedia’s content.

We want to thank the legal team at Hogan Lovells Germany, especially Morten Petersenn and Katharina Schwalke, for their excellent representation in this case. Also, thank you to all the individual donors who help fund our work defending access to free and open knowledge and free speech online.

If you would like to learn more about legal threats facing the Wikimedia projects, you can read about some of the legal trends that the free knowledge movement faces at Meta-Wiki, and about some of our other legal cases in Portugal and in Germany as well. At the time of writing, the Foundation’s recent win in an English forum shopping case was under appeal by the plaintiff.