After spending more than three hours hearing arguments from a raft of attorneys from both sides of the fence, a federal judge here has ruled in favour of Wikileaks.

Wikileaks, which uses Wikileaks.org as its primary domain, is a whistle-blowing site that focuses on posting leaked documents.

"The court denies the motion for preliminary injunction, and the court hereby dissolves the injunction against [domain name registrar] Dynadot, and the litigation may now proceed," said US District Judge Jeffrey White, who had called a brief recess, indicating that he was inclined to revisit his order from earlier this month that effectively pulled the plug on the Wikileaks.org domain name.

White has since issued a written order denying Bank Julius Baer's (BJB) request for a preliminary injunction, dissolving the permanent injunction against Dynadot, and setting a hearing schedule.

The order said: "It is clear that in all but the most exceptional circumstances, an injunction restricting speech pending final resolution of the constitutional concerns is impermissible."

The motions are due 14 March, oppositions to those motions are due 28 March, and reply briefs are due on 4 April. The next hearing will be on 16 May.

"The court has the obligation to get it right," White had told attorneys for BJB, earlier Friday. "I took an obligation to uphold the Constitution. The court has its own obligation to raise these issues. Contrary to what you say, my obligation is to look down the road and see where this thing is going."

The bank sued Wikileaks in Federal Court in California because the registrar, Dynadot, is located there. Wikileaks alleges that the documents in question show that the bank supports the "ultra-rich's offshore tax avoidance, tax evasion, asset hiding, and money laundering."

But a host of free speech groups, including Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, requested to intervene in the case on behalf of Wikileaks.

They threw down a series of legal land mines against BJB, including that Wikileaks can't be sued in a US court by a foreign company because it consists of foreigners; that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act prevents any action against Dynadot; that the First Amendment prohibits an overly broad attack against a Web site just to delete a subset of pages; that Dynadot cannot refuse to transfer the domain name to another registrar; and so on.

Some of the filings amounted to an implicit criticism of White, who granted the allegedly First Amendment-problematic order in the first place. So the first thing White did on Friday was defend himself -- more to the half dozen reporters in the back of the room than to the attorneys.

"The parties need to understand, and those in this courtroom need to understand, the status of this case," White said. "This is a case in which we had a [dispute] with named parties, and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit ... Nobody filed any timely responses to the court's order."

While giving his ruling, White explained that the case is properly in his jurisdiction, in part because the domain name holder, an Australian citizen living in Kenya, sent an attorney to court Friday.

One attorney for BJB said there were no First Amendment problems, invoking a US Supreme Court precedent dealing with an intercepted conversation played by a radio station because, "We allege, your honour, that Wikileaks has actively solicited the theft of private information ... they are participants in the illegality."

BJB also said, "We're talking about private banking information, account numbers, personal numbers like Social Security numbers ... all this is private information that's not newsworthy ... None of the publishers here today would want their own banking information posted on the Internet."

The judge's pre-ruling reply: "Let me play devil's advocate here. Is it newsworthy if some prominent citizen is ... evading taxes, laundering funds? Wouldn't that be something in the public interest?"