• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 3, 2008

Whistle-blower site Wikileaks.org got its domain name back Friday, after a federal judge reversed his prior shutdown order.

"It is clear that in all but the most exceptional circumstances, an injunction restricting speech pending final resolution of the constitutional concerns is impermissible," wrote San Francisco federal district court Judge Jeffrey White. The case has attracted widespread media attention.

Two weeks prior, White ordered the domain registry Dynadot to take down the site and also ordered Wikileaks to remove documents related to Julius Baer bank. The orders had been sought by Swiss bank Julius Baer, which alleged the site hosted false documents that wrongly implicated its Cayman Islands branch in tax fraud and money-laundering schemes.

The takedown order prevented people from accessing the site at the domain name Wikileaks.org, but the site remained available at its IP address and mirror sites abroad like Wikileaks.be.

The dispute grew out of a lawsuit filed last month by Julius Baer against both domain registry Dynadot and Wikileaks, which has posted 1.2 million "confidential" documents in the last year, exposing matters like conditions at Guantanamo Bay.

On Feb. 15, Julius Baer agreed to dismiss the case against Dynadot in exchange for the domain registry's agreeing to the takedown order.

A host of civil rights groups and news organizations, including The Associated Press, ACLU, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, filed briefs in the case asking the judge to vacate his prior orders on the grounds that they infringed on First Amendment freedom of speech rights.

The groups also argued that the case against Dynadot should have been dismissed because the federal Communications Decency Act provides that domain registries are immune from lawsuits based on content posted by publishers.

On Friday, White indicated he might dismiss the case altogether because it doesn't appear to involve U.S. parties. A lawyer appeared in court Friday representing the owner of the site, identified as an Australian living in Kenya.

White also pointed out that the legal proceedings were drawing attention to the dispute and the documents in question, writing that it appeared the "broad injunction issued as to Dynadot had exactly the opposite effect as was intended."

The order, however, did leave open the possibility of a narrower injunction in the future. "Given sufficient evidence that the Court has jurisdiction to hear the matter and that the restriction would be constitutionally valid, the Court might fashion an injunction requiring the limited redaction of identifying information on the leaked documents," he wrote.