Kauderstrike: German politician and copyright

‘Kauderstrike’ is not a new computer game, but the nickname for a political project of Siegfried Kauder. The leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag wants to cut off copyright offenders from the internet. Now he appears to be a copyright offender himself.

Siegfried Kauder wants to introduce a two strikes system in Germany. If someone is found guilty of illegal downloading, file sharing, copyright violations on the internet, there will be one warning shot. The second time the offender will be prohibited from internet access for three weeks.

But how about Kauder’s own website? Several pictures there were found to be protected by copyright. Kauder admitted that he did not have the usage rights. He defended his political idea and said that this was the warning shot, and that the system would work well: he immediately “obtained the author’s rights” (Urheberrechte) for these pictures.

Critics answered that Kauder cannot obtain author’s rights according to German law, unless he is adopted by the author’s rights holder (who subsequently dies). He can only purchase the usage rights which is what probably happened.

Even a parliamentary group colleague, Peter Altmaier, twittered on the Kauderstrike plans: if someone steals a book, he is a criminal, but you don’t take away his reading glasses.

By the way, Siegfried Kauder is a lawyer and chairman of the house committee on juridical affairs.

Translating Jimmy Wales into German

Translating is difficult. Is is true even more for emotional, persuasive texts with a specific goal. In the case of the fundraising for Wikimedia, Jimmy Wales uses a lot of expressions that may work in English, but that are difficult to translate to German. Here some examples.

“I don’t get paid a cent for my work at Wikipedia”: The German translation dropped the cent and says only that Jimmy Wales is not paid. Maybe the translator thought that the reader might wonder which cent (Dollar or Euro), and some German-speaking people (e.g., the Swiss) don’t pay with pennies themselves.

“Commerce is fine,” he wrote. The dictionary (I am using dict.cc)  offers rather specialist expressions, “Handel” (actually: trade) or the direct translation of the latinist word, “Kommerz”. The latter was used by a previous contributor. I changed it into “Geschäftstätigkeit” (“being busy with business”), because “Kommerz” in German is rather a pejorative.

Sometimes the Jimmy-appeal is a little too solemn, too impassionate for German readers. An example is the “temple for the mind”. We kept that, but cut on the words “human” and “humanitarian” (adjectives for “project”). It is difficult to call Wikipedia in German a “humanitäres Projekt”, because that word is used for help at humanitarian catastrophes (earthquakes, floodings). The German dictionary translation “menschenfreundlich” (friendly to humans) sounds nearly comic.  The original translator turned it into “gemeinnützig” (charitable, not-for-profit), I made “wohltätig” of it (beneficent, philanthropic), and will see how long it remains.

“Wikipedia’s 400 million users”: Obviously, this does not relate to “users” as registered contributors to Wikipedia. The German word is “Benutzer”, and the translator used the slightly different word “Nutzer”. I turned it into “Leser” (readers), because that is what Jimmy meant. Right?

Newsletter of Wikimedia Deutschland

Nice: the national Wikimedia organization of Germany introduced a newsletter. After I had suggested that more than two years ago. Now in August and September 2011, there has been a lot of commodity around the image filter in Germany. Some people complained on the German organization mailinglist that there had been few information on the image filter, and that in general they felt insufficiently about what is going on in the global Wikimedia universe. Especially people without thorough English knowledge (/ English Wikimedia jargon knowledge) had difficulties to keep up.

Wiki Loves Monuments comes to a close

A couple of days left, Wiki Loves Monuments has already harvested many, many good pictures for… Wikipedia? No, for everybody. The mark of 110,000 pictures has been reached, and maybe they will be 150,000 by September 30th. One can expect a last rush at the last day.

We learned that all 111 monuments of Andorra has a picture, that the young daughter of Achim Raschka might be the youngest contributor of all, that the Polish have organized expeditions to the less populated parts of their country. I hope that later we will have a nice handbook with good practices and some anecdotes.

Like those about the German authorities and their incapabilities (at large) to provide good lists of monuments. Many were dated, some even hand written…

 

Leonardo Award in Cologne

Prize organizers and prize winners in Cologne (picture: Franz Pfluegl, CC-BY-SA)

Last week I have been in Cologne for the Leonardo Award for European Corporate Learning. The organizing committee, consisting of people from science and economics, considered Jimmy Wales to be a perfect prize winner (first and only previous winner was Jacques Delors, former EU commission president). In contrast to M. Delors, Jimmy Wales did not come, and he was represented by Wikipedians Denis Barthel (DE), Nando Stöcklin (CH) and me (DE/NL).

The echo, of course, was not as loud as if  Jimmy had shown up. But people were nice to us and we three completed each other in the performances well.

In general, the attendees came from the world of enterprises and were mainly interested in benefits for corporations, and it was not always easy to find a useful answer to their questions. We felt being quite foreign in this environment, but didn’t regret to come at all. Maybe one or the other contact will bring fruits.

Germanophone WikiConvention established?

Wikimedia Deutschland presents itself

On September 9-11, 2011, Wikimedians from the three major German speaking countries gathered. More than 170 participants shared their knowledge about Wikipedia, Wikimedia and other wikis at the first ‘WikiConvention‘.

Nurenberg was chosen because it is situated much closer to Austria and Switzerland than Lüneburg in Northern Germany, where in 2010 a similar convention took place (‘Skillshare’). The Bildungszentrum (folk high school) proved to be a perfect place, close to the central station and spacious enough for a huge number of sessions (more than 60).

The WikiConvention was supported by the national Wikimedia organizations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Especially the German organization made use of the occasion to present itself and its staff. A number of journalists were present, and the media coverage in general was quite nice.

Among the presentations and sessions: Become a plagiarism hunter in 60 minutes; the election of featured articles; is Wikipedia an encyclopedia; city wiki; the Support Team (OTRS); Wikimedia and Open Access; OpenStreetMap and OpenSeaMap; are women the better encyclopedists; Wikipedias in regional languages; … and as a special evening contribution: ‘Sexipedia – Reloaded’.

Screw you, usage rights, says politician

Sebastian Edathy is one of the young(er) stars of the Social Democratic Bundestag faction. He belongs to the committee on legal affairs and is called an expert on copyright law, according to Die Welt newspaper.

Recently Edathy put a photograph of the liberal minister Rösler on his Facebook page, with a not so friendly ‘joke’. Then a photographer went to Edathy and said: you have a lot of pictures on your Facebook page, for your political activities. Did you obtain the usage rights from those photographers?

Edathy’s reaction: you can sue me if you want, and: ‘Sie können mich mal… kreuzweise!” (Roughly: ‘Screw you.’)

Pupils love Wikipedia, teachers hate it?

Wikimedia Deutschland’s blog made us happy with two studies about Wikipedia and school in Germany. 38 % of pupils, on the one hand, consult Wikipedia. But many other activities and sites are more popular: search engines, children sites, video clips, online communities and e-mails.

A different study, part of the (N)onliner Atlas 2011, asked 305 teachers face-to-face. How do they prepare for lessons? Do they use Wikipedia, search engines, online material from publishers, government educational material, online networks for teachers? Exactly those and more, in this order. 53,8 % use Wikipedia, much more than the special web sites for teachers (lehrer-online: 37,1 %).

Wikipedia is used by 1 % of the teachers in nearly every hour, by 14 % several times a week, by 20 % for about once a week, by 40 % several times a month, by 18 % for about once a month, by 7 % less than that.

In general, the use of online services depends very much on age. 69,7 % of the teachers below 35 years use online networks, only 34,7 % of those above 50 years. Online educational platforms are used only by 27,3 % even of the younger teachers.

 

 

Wiki loves monuments: tools help, but still…

Franeker, Martena Museum and a lot of surroundings

September 2011 is the month of Wiki Loves Monuments, the great photo competition. Take pictures of monuments for Wikipedia, and win… they say. But uploading the right way is more work than you might think.

In July, I was on holiday in Friesland (the Dutch province). For example I walked through Franeker, and took photographs of old buildings. Occasionally I took pictures of street signs and house numbers, too. Still, it is not always easy home at the computer to find out which building is exactly which one.  I wasn’t as diligent as in a different municipality where I had printed out the monuments list in advance and checked out every building before taking the picture.

But there is a tool that shows me on Google Maps where the monuments in Franeker (or elsewhere) are. I follow on the map the way I went on my holiday, and identified the buildings. Sometimes I saw that a building houses a certain shop, for example a shoe shop, and googling the name of the shoe shop led me to its exact house number. That’s what I need to check whether this is the monument I was looking for.

The Google Maps tool provides me already with the monument’s identifier, a number given by the Dutch Office for Cultural Heritage. I copy it into the file name of the picture. Later, when I upload the picture, I don’t have to look for it again.

Uploading happens to Wikimedia Commons, the central media archive for Wikipedia. The guys from the Wiki Loves Monuments contest provided a special upload wizard. This tool attaches already some useful data and also has a field for the monument’s identifier. It takes some time to fill in everything, and usually you have to look for this or an other category.

And winning a price? Well, that’s for other’s to decide. I already got one, name I contributed to the largest collection of free media and made some Frisians happy.