• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, March 6, 2008

Less than one week after a federal judge vacated an order aimed at shutting down the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks.org, Swiss bank Julius Baer has dismissed its ill-fated lawsuit against the site.

In papers filed Wednesday, the bank told the federal district court in San Francisco that it no longer wished to proceed with the case, though it reserved the right to re-file later.

Julius Baer filed a lawsuit against Wikileaks and its domain registry, Dynadot, last month, alleging that the site hosted false documents that violated the privacy of bank customers and that wrongly implicated the bank's Cayman Islands branch in fraud and money laundering.

On Feb. 15, federal district court judge Jeffrey White ordered Wikileaks to remove the documents and also ordered Dynadot to shutter the Wikileaks.org domain. Dynadot had agreed to the order, even though the company had a solid argument that the case against it should have been dismissed; the federal Communications Decency Act provides that domain hosts are immune from liability for content posted by publishers.

The injunctions drew the ire of civil liberties advocates and news organizations throughout the country, many of whom appeared in court last week to argue that the injunctions violated First Amendment free speech rights.

Meantime, despite the court orders, the material remained widely available online at urls other than Wikileaks.org. In other words, not only were the court orders almost certainly unconstitutional, but they also proved unenforceable.

Late last week, White realized the problems with the injunctions. In a decision vacating his prior orders, he acknowledged the constitutional concerns and also noted that the likely result of the legal proceedings -- more people than ever viewing the contested documents -- was the exact opposite of what Julius Baer had hoped to accomplish.