Two German men who killed an actor in 1990 are suing the charity behind the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, claiming that its inclusion of detail of their crimes infringes their right to privacy.

The case has become an instant online cause celebre – with one lawyer saying that the integrity of history itself is at stake – because it ranges the US's First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, against German privacy and criminal laws, which dictate that after a certain period a crime is "spent" and cannot be referred to. The UK has similar rules on the reporting of lesser crimes.

The two men, who cannot be named here because the Guardian is available in Germany, became infamous for the killing, for which they were sentenced to life in prison in 1993. They were released in 2007 and 2008. But Alexander Stopp, the lawyer for the two men, noted that Germany's courts allow a criminal's name to be withheld in news reports once they have served a prison term and a set period has expired.

"They should be able to go on and be resocialised, and lead a life without being publicly stigmatised" for their crime, Stopp told the New York Times. "A criminal has a right to privacy, too, and a right to be left alone."

German editors of Wikipedia, which is available in multiple languages around the world, have already removed the killers' names from the German-language version about the victim, Walter Sedlmayr. But Stopp has also filed suit in German courts to demand that the Wikimedia Foundation, which funds and runs Wikipedia, remove their names from the English-language article.

In fact Wikipedia administrators – the unpaid group that helps oversee the running of the site – have been discussing the challenge for more than a year. But there is deep disagreement about whether the individuals' German-determined right to privacy overrides the US First Amendment.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, said in a bulletin on Thursday that "he who controls the past, controls the future" – intentionally echoing George Orwell's 1984, in which the government controls the records of the past in order to control the population.

Jennifer Granick, a lawyer for the EFF, wrote: "This slogan from Orwell's Ministry of Truth is anathema under US law, which takes it as an article of faith that people must be allowed to publish truthful information about historical events. A foreign power should not be able to censor publications in the United States, regardless of whether doing so suits the country's domestic law.

"At stake is the integrity of history itself. If all publications have to abide by the censorship laws of any and every jurisdiction just because they are accessible over the global internet, then we will not be able to believe what we read, whether about Falun Gong (censored by China), the Thai king (censored under lèse majesté) or German murders. Wikipedia appears ready to fight for write once, read anywhere history, and EFF will be watching this fight closely."

The English-language Wikipedia article about Sedlmayr notes that the details of the killers' names are available from a number of online sources in Germany.

Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer who has represented the New York Times, told the paper that every judge on the US Supreme Court would agree that the Wikipedia article "is easily, comfortably protected by the First Amendment". But Germany's courts have come up with a different balance between the right to privacy and the public's right to know, Abrams said, and "once you're in the business of suppressing speech, the quest for more speech to suppress is endless".

The German law springs from a decision of Germany's highest court in 1973, which has led to publications there referring to people whose convictions are "spent" are as, for example, "the perpetrator or, Mr L"

But the German duo may discover that their attempts to remove their names from the electronic record has precisely the opposite result – a phenomenon known online as the "Streisand effect", after the singer, whose attempts to remove pictures of her beach house from online records outraged people, who then copied the pictures and distributed them over the internet.

Michael Godwin, the general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, said the foundation "doesn't edit content at all, unless we get a court order from a court of competent jurisdiction … if our German editors have chosen to remove the names of the murderers from their article on Walter Sedlmayr, we support them in that choice." But, he added: "The English-language editors have chosen to include the names of the killers, and we support them in that choice."

Wikipedia, as one of the top-ranking sites for information from many searches, is often a key source of information about events or people. It has reined in editing on biographies of people who are still alive after a number of embarrassing incidents where people's details were altered to create libels. And when David Rohde, a New York Times reporter, was seized by the Taliban in Afghanistan, the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, personally appealed to the site's editors to keep details about it quiet. Yet the information was available on other smaller sites.

Wikipedia has more than 12m articles, including 3m in English, but has just 30 staff – and Godwin comprises its entire legal staff.

The killers' lawyer contacted Wikimedia about both men, citing cases since 2006 that had suppressed publication of their names in Germany. He has won a default judgment against Wikimedia for one of the men in a German court, and last month sent the foundation a letter regarding the other, whose case against Wikimedia is pending. "The German courts, including several courts of appeals, have held that our client's name and likeness cannot be used any more in publication regarding Sedlmayr's death," he wrote.

Wikimedia told Stopp it questioned the relevance of any judgments in the German courts, since, it said, it has no operations in Germany and no assets there.