Following the Judge's ruling last week, the case in the California Northern District Federal Court against WikiLeakS.org has now been dropped.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation have a copy of the Plaintiff's Notice of Dismissal (.pdf 4 pages) whereby William J. Briggs II, a junior lawyer from Lavely & Singer files a Voluntary Motion of Dismissal without prejudice on behalf of the Swiss bank Bank Julius Baer and their Cayman Islands tax haven subsidiary Julius Baer Bank Trust Co. Ltd in their ill advised public relations disaster against Wikileaks.org, their domain name registrar Dynadot LLC, and the 10 unnamed John Does.
TO ALL PARTIES AND THEIR COUNSEL OF RECORD:PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that Plaintiffs BANK JULIUS BAER & CO. LTD and JULIUS BAER BANK AND TRUST CO. LTD (“Plaintiffs”) hereby
voluntarily dismisses, without prejudice, the above captioned action in its entirety, whereby Plaintiffs may, at their option, later pursue their claims, including in an alternate court, jurisdiction or venue.
See the rest of the EFF's copies of the Court documents: Bank Julius Baer& co. v Wikileaks
By dropping the case, after the strong hints from the Judge to think again, now that the "cat is out of the bag" in regard to the alleged documents which have been published via WikiLeakS.org, the remaining Motions to Intervene by various media and civil liberties organisations and individuals will not now be heard, .
Lavely & Singer, based in Century City, near Hollywood, claim to be "one of the world's premiere talent-side entertainment litigation firms", which may well be true.
However, their legalistic bullying tactics and failure to understand, or deliberate misrepresentation of the internet's technical infrastructure, has rebounded on their clients Bank Julius Bär.
Rightly or wrongly now, for many people, and for search engine queries into the future, Bank Julius Baer is associated with with illegal tax evasion and money laundering.
"Bad publicity" might be better than "no publicity" for Hollywood media celebrity wannabes, but that should be an anathema for a Swiss Bank whose business model is supposedly to provide confidential, trust based private banking and investment "wealth management" services for the very rich.
Plaintiffs may, at their option, later pursue their claims, including in an alternate court, jurisdiction or venue.
Surely the Gnomes of Zürich cannot be so stupid as to commit commercial suicide, by continuing to employ "media celebrity attack dog" lawyers ?
This case also highlights some more Questions about the WikiLeakS.org project:
What will happen with a legal court case, say involving Contempt of Court for breaking the UK High Court Injunction regarding the Northern Rock plc pre- nationalisation investor prospectus, and the UK equivalent of Lavely & Singer, the London based law firm of Schillings ?
This is within the European Union, which does have legal jurisdiction over the actual WikiLeakS.org servers currently in Sweden.
Wikileaks has not competency pertaining to fair play. If the information Wikileaks uses are based on (illegal) larceny, Wikileaks is like a Mafia fighting another Mafia... This is evident since Wikileaks does not only commit crimes on dictatorial regime in former Soviet Union, Asia and Africa but as the lawsuit with Bank Baer aids and demonstrates, Wikileaks abets crimes in Western democratic states. It moreover favors crimes of hatred and extortions of individuals wanting to blackmail their employers. That is what the case Wikileaks and Julius Baer is about. Who wants to join a Mafia in order to fight against Mafia?