A Russian trucker in Dordrecht involved in a bar brawl was released because the summons he received was poorly translated from Dutch into Russian using Google translate. When the trucker was being questioned at the police station, he had a Russian interpreter and claimed to have understood what he had to do, although he never signed the summons.

The Russian interpreter showed up in court, but not the trucker. She was asked to then translate what was written in the summons. Instead of (here I am translating this from Dutch) ‘you are to appear in court on 3 August 2010′, it went more like ‘you have to avoid being in court on 3 August 2010′. In Dutch, ‘vóórkomen’, with the stress on the first syllable, means ‘to appear’, while ‘voorkómen’ means ‘to prevent’.

With Google translate, the Dutch infinitive verb ‘voorkomen’ (no way to indicate which of the two identically spelled verbs you want translated) still today produced the infinitive verb ‘to prevent’ ‘предотвращать’ (imperfective aspect) and not even a hint of the perfective aspect of the same verb, ‘предотвратить’. In any decent dictionary both aspects are given so people can use the right one.

In Russian, if you pronouce the perfective verb ‘to write’ ‘написать’ with the wrong stress, you’re pissing instead of writing, so yes, stress matters.

(Link: depers.nl)

Dutch gamers in Rotterdam have scored a Guinness world record for the most hours of consecutive gaming: 50 hours playing Red Dead Redemption. The old record was held by Chirantan Patnaik from India at 40 hours 20 minutes, according to the print version Dutch daily De Pers.

The attempt to break the record was organised by Dutch company Vogel’s Products that wanted to promote a Sony PlayStation 3 controller.

(Link: wireupdate.com, Photo of a PlayStation controller 2 by blindfutur3′, some rights reserved)

Google books has received the green light on 14 July from the Dutch National Library to scan more than 160,000 public domain books from the 18th and 19th centuries. The scanned books will then be available on the library’s website and on Europeana, an online library with six million books. Scanning is going to take years, after which the books will be available again physically in the library. We wrote about the library’s ambitious plans earlier this year.

The collection features a wide range of historical, legal and social works, including Jan ten Brink, author and professor of Dutch literature, tutor of great Dutch author, Louis Couperus and L.A. te Winkel and Matthias de Vries, co-editors of the Dictionary of the Dutch Language.

According to Nrcnext as well as the Seattle Times, there is a worry that by being the sole administrator of all these books as well as turning a profit on them, Google will have too much power over the digital book market. “Our cultural heritage is not Google’s to have,” explains Geert Lovink, a media theoretician, in Nrcnext. He believes other companies can handle some of the scanning and distribution as well, even though he thinks the generally idea is good.

(Links: nrcnext.nl, kb.nl and seattletimes)

A hashtag in Twitter is a word or phrase preceded by the pound sign (#). If it’s a sentence, like #whatsontelly, it is written without spaces. It gives a certain punch to tweets, as a tweet is only 140 characters long. It is also used for people to search for subjects like #obama #oilspill #tigerwoods and so on.

Our favourite Internet-savvy lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet explains how some Dutch folk have missed their mark.

First of all, the trademark claim for #weetjevandedag (roughly, this day in history or what happened on this day) was claimed on an image (a square, black-and-white, cartoon-like smiley face), not on the hashtag expression. If you don’t use the image, it’s not an infringement. Second, such an expression is general and does not differentiate the trademark in question from other things. Third, the trademark claims it already won a court case on someone using their trademark with no proof anywhere to be found to back it up. In English it’s called ‘hot air’, in Dutch it’s lovingly called ‘baked air’ (‘gebakken lucht’).

(Link tip @wilbertbaan (Twitter), blog.iusmentis.com)

The Dutch will have bought 250,000 tablet PCs by the end of the year, market research company GfK predicts. Currently, there are about 50,000 e-book readers in the Netherlands.

GfK’s Laurens van den Oever told this at the Mediapark Jaarcongres two weeks ago, Bright reports. He also predicted according to Emerce that in three years’ time, 60% of the Dutch households will own a TV with an Internet connection. Today, that number is 10%.

(Photo by Rego Korosi, some rights reserved)

Bankruptcy trustees often keep on-line shops running even though the companies behind them have gone bust, and therefore cannot deliver the goods.

Last week, Webwereld reported about at least three on-line stores that kept taking orders and payments even after they had gone bankrupt. Trade association ICTWaarborg had already sounded the alarm about this last year, but notices the problem continues unabated. According to the trade org, trustees in bankruptcies should shut down the on-line stores as part of their jobs.

In the Netherlands, the trustee in bankruptcy is the one who gets their salary by skimming the property off the top, and is often a lawyer appointed by their law school buddy, the judge. As you can see, absolutely no conflict of interest could possibly take place there.

From what I understand, people can only get money back from a trustee (curator in Dutch) when there has been an ‘undeniable mistake‘. The article I link to tells of a case where somebody wanted to wire money to party A, but accidentally wired it to party B who had just been declared bankrupt. That is considered an undeniable mistake, because the party making the payment had never intended to pay the bankrupt party.

Meet Peter Smaardijk and Ilse Segers, twittering cops. These two police officers from Etten-Leur and Breda respectively have started posting about their beat from their Blackberries last week.

Together with two officers from Tilburg they will post tweets about their daily police life in order to be more accessible. The Noord Brabant police also hopes to increase its network of eyes and ears this way.

In practice, the four officers twitter both standard police announcements (“watch out for pick pockets”) and their day-to-day affairs (“Spent the rest of the night writing the report.”). The police recommend citizens do not to use Twitter to report a crime.

(Photo: Twitter.com / Politie Midden en West Brabant. Link: BN/De Stem.)

In 2006 I borrowed Orangemaster’s camera, hopped on the train to Eindhoven, and visited a start-up at Philips’ famous High Tech Campus to look at its single, yet to be released product, the Iliad e-reader. Today I learnt through newspaper FD that the former start-up Irex has filed for and received bankruptcy (Dutch).

The Iliad was an E Ink based tablet computer suited mainly for reading, hence the name. At the time, only Sony had a comparable device, the Librié.

Irex’s goal was to replace paper, not necessarily to compete with similar e-readers for consumers. To that effect, its reader had a larger screen and it could also be written to using a stylus. The company left selling books to third parties, expecting content providers to bundle the Iliad with their products. The intended customers for the device weren’t novel readers, but students, lawyers and others used to toting around kilos of text books and note pads each day.

Later, Irex also turned to the consumer market, where it had to compete with the Kindle, the Apple Ipad and the newer Sony devices, and even the Bebook, another Dutch brand of e-reader. Apparently, trying to introduce its latest consumer device in the USA is what broke the camel’s back. Disappointing sales due to a late FCC approval (only after the Christmas season) meant that Irex’s cash flow dried up,

The good news is that besides its cash flow problem, Irex is apparently in good health, and has a lot of intellectual capital. The type of bankruptcy that they have filed for and received last Tuesday, called surseance van betaling, does not mean the end of the company but merely a temporary stop of its obligation to pay bills. Irex owes more than 5 million euro, mostly to Deutsche Bank. FD reports in a follow-up article that lots of other companies are interested in buying the outfit.

See also:

• Two new e-book readers introduced
• Irex Iliad and the e-paper paradigm

Usenet community FTD has lost the lawsuit it had started pre-emptively against the Brein foundation to establish that its activities are legal.

FTD’s members publish information about where to find binary postings that contain works published without copyright owners’ consent. According to a very annoyed Arnoud Engelfriet, one of FTD’s lawyers (photo), the judge held that mentioning file names isn’t just aiding illegal publication, it is a form of illegal publication in itself if the person doing the mentioning is performing a key role in getting the work distributed.

The judge in this case, C.A.J.F.M. Hensen, has a job on the side teaching people how to fight ‘piracy,’ and as such has a clear interest in establishing as hard a line as possible in copyright law.

Brein calls itself an ‘anti-piracy’ bureau, and is the Dutch equivalent of the infamous RIAA. FTD is considering an appeal.

(Photo of Arnoud Engelfriet by Petra de Boevere, some rights reserved.)

Online music service Spotify is now available as of today in the Netherlands. Instead of continuously having to go to YouTube and weed through bad mobile phone recordings of your favourites artists or be subjected to everything that sounds like the band you like but never the actual band from Last.fm, it could be time to try Spotify.

“With Spotify, there are no limits to the amount of music you could listen to. Just help yourself to whatever you want, whenever you want it.” Even Blip.fm, and Zonga get their songs from YouTube, while Spotify is what everyone wanted and nobody was getting: that one song you needed, right away.

They claim to have eight million songs, including a specially recorded track by duo Guus Meeuwis and Marco Borsato, teaming up for a song called ‘Schouder aan Schouder’ (‘Shoulder to shoulder’) available exclusively on Spotify.

(Link: Spotify)

Tags: Spotify