October 1, 2009

Man must remove 5,000 books from his house says court

Filed under: Architecture,Literature,Weird by Branko Collin @ 9:10 am

book_stackHans Bauer from Groningen must remove 5,000 books from his home, after a court agreed with housing corporation Patrimonium last Tuesday that his library constitutes a fire hazard.

Telegraaf reports (Dutch) that Bauer had already voluntarily removed 4,000 books earlier after the housing corporation had complained. Looking at the picture accompanying the article, I cannot say that his house looks more cluttered than several book stores I’ve known, although truth be told none of them are still around today. And 5,000 books is peanuts compared to for instance the library of late writer, TV presenter and bibliophile Boudewijn Büch, which counted 100,000 works at one point in time.

In the meantime, a local self storage company has given Bauer six months worth of free storage, RTV Noord reports (Dutch).

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August 29, 2009

Lauragate: solo sailing school girl to be tested for two months, says judge

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 1:28 am

The verdict is in. Laura Dekker, the girl that wants to set a world record by becoming the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe in a sail boat all by herself, will be put under supervision for two months while a psychologist will try and determine whether this 13-year old is fit for that feat.

Dekker’s parents will retain custody, but will have to ask permission from supervisor Bureau Jeugdzorg (the executive branch, so to speak, of the child protection industry) for major decisions pertaining her, a Utrecht court ruled today. The judge stated emphatically that Dick Dekker was not a bad father for supporting his daughter’s ambitions, reports Volkskrant (Dutch). Amsterdam psychologist S. Moonen will now try and find out whether Laura is mentally fit for such a huge undertaking, and whether it is possible for her to be schooled from a distance.

Laura was not present during the reading of the verdict. She tried to avoid the media, and instead gave an exclusive TV interview to Jeugdjournaal (children’s news show of NOS, Dutch). In it she said she was not afraid of the psychological examination, because she would not have gone if she wasn’t ready. She also denied reports that claimed she would be alone for two years in a row, explaining she would go to shore regularly, and she would be surrounded by other sailors taking the same routes because of storm seasons and so on. (Not that fellow ‘yachties’ always stick to the unspoken code of writing poems about flowers and being nice to puppies.)

(Photo by Wikimedia user Jonathunder, some rights reserved)

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August 15, 2009

Lucia de B., angel or witch? [HAR 2009]

Filed under: Science by Branko Collin @ 10:35 pm

I just turned away from the lock-picking talk, as the tent was absolutely packed (me being 5 minutes late). I don’t know how many people fit in these convention tents, hundreds, perhaps thousands, but that is the amount of people that after tonight may know how to break every lock you own.

Earlier today I was at the talk with possibly the smallest amount of listeners of this 4-day exercise, you might even say the attendants resembled Cantor Dust. OK, lousy statistical jokes aside, this talk was by statistician Richard Gill of the University of Leiden and dealt with the Lucia de Berk case.

I had heard of the case before. In 2001, a nurse from The Hague was accused of having murdered dozens of patients, and the strange thing was that most of her guilt was determined by statistics: she had been near the victims at the time of their deaths, and although a direct link with the accused in the form of a confession or evidence could not be established, the court found that the statistical likelihood of her being near all these victims at the time of death was so minute, she must have done it.

At the time I thought this reasoning seemed silly, but I have learned early on in life never to argue with statisticians. So imagine my surprise: here was a statician who argued that the court’s reason had indeed been extremely silly, and that an innocent woman had gone to jail.

I won’t bore you with repeating the entire lecture: author Maarten ‘t Hart summarized Gill’s position excellently in this article from NRC (Dutch). Gill’s paper on how likely the chance is that a nurse was on active duty during all deaths concludes that one in nine nurses would have gone to jail (PDF).

(more…)

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May 30, 2009

Optimize websites, lose lawsuits

Filed under: Automobiles,Online by Branko Collin @ 12:18 am

Remember that story about the website that lost a lawsuit due to how Google summarized its contents in search results? Well, the judge’s opinion came in yesterday, and it gets even crazier.

What went on before? Miljoenhuizen.nl had a web page on which the words “Zwartepoorte” and “failliet” (bankrupt) appeared together, although totally unrelated. According to Zwartepoorte the Google summary of that page caused people to conclude that the company had gone bankrupt, and so it asked Miljoenhuizen.nl to change the webpage to undo that impression. The latter refused and the former sued.

Miljoenhuizen.nl’s owner had—let me quote the court—“organized his website in such a manner that it scored “high” in Google, [so] the defendant has a responsibility in this matter.” In other words because the defendant ranked high in the search engine, he lost the case. He probably never helped himself by telling the judge how easy and trivial it is to change the page in a way that Google would no longer produce the damaging text.

Some good news for Miljoenhuizen.nl though is that it managed to net Solv (Dutch), the respectable internet law firm of amongst others Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm—he who once convinced a court that Kazaa was legal, although by then the filesharing company had fled to Australia only to be convicted there, perhaps because lesser legal minds roam the steppe of Southland.

(Full verdict here (Dutch, PDF). Link: Iusmentis. Joris van Hoboken, expert on the confluence of law and search engines, has an opinion in English.)

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April 26, 2009

Five ways to lose your employees during a crisis

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:46 am

If you want to fire staff you have to go through the courts, a costly process, and a judge may deny your request altogether. Z24 has compiled a list of 5 ways (Dutch) that modern, mid-sized to large companies use to ditch their workers.

The idea behind the list is that in this time of crisis, the courts will at least grant you a permit for some dismissals. The courts will have to follow certain methods to compile this list, which basically comes down to maintaining a certain diversity of age within all levels of the company. Employers that want to keep only the eager-beaver young workers, or the workers that contribute the most, may feel compelled to game the system in order to trim the fat.

Z24’s list:

  1. Promote favourite employees to other functions
  2. Create a new department, discontinue the old, and let the workers of the latter apply for jobs in the former
  3. Have a few, quick evaluation rounds; trump up charges of bad functioning in the first, conclude that the worker isn’t willing to improve in the second
  4. Give certain employees only boring tasks, and hope they’ll leave by themselves
  5. Promote creeps to become the bosses of the ones you want to get rid of; again hope the latter will leave by themselves

Another method that used to be popular was to rely on the lack of familiarity most employees have with the law by simply stating to an employee that they were fired. This happened to my mother once in the 1960s: her boss told her she was fired, and that she had to pack her stuff and leave. When it came to a court case, the boss denied ever having said anything of that nature, and since there were no witnesses of the dismissal, but plenty to the ensuing ‘dereliction of duty,’ the court could do little else than to allow the company to fire my mother.

I don’t know why this latter method isn’t more popular, although I’d venture to guess it’s because it might backfire so easily. You can fool the first employee, but not the next few hundred, which makes it a method larger companies would be unlikely to use.

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March 14, 2009

Blogging from prison

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 5:29 pm

A 56-year-old Dutch woman, Anna B. as she calls herself, was caught smuggling 8 kilos of “very good Dutch weed” into Italy, two years ago. Her lawyer managed to make it so that after a few months she could spend the rest of her 3 year 4 month sentence under house arrest. Friends got her an apartment in what appears to be a very idyllic village in Lombardia, and another stroke of luck made it so that she got two hours a day to go to the supermarket, time she uses to go hiking.

What does one do the rest of the day? Blogging (Dutch), taking pictures, making music, living on the Internet.

The lawyer called to tell me that next Monday, March 5, is the court date where we’ll again try and get me freedom of movement within the province between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m.

That’s quite a lot.

I really only wanted to sail a boat to the horizon for once. Or walk until I am tired. Or eat the daily special at the daily special restaurant at the top of the hill. Hmmm, nice.

Anna got her extra bit of freedom last week (Dutch).

Photo of Lake Como by ezioman, some rights reserved.

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December 16, 2008

First court victory for copyright trolls

Filed under: Online by Branko Collin @ 8:01 am

“Copyright trolls” Cozzmoss got their first victory in a court of law, where they successfully sued blogger Joffrey Vermeule for copyright infringement of a newspaper article. The court awarded 402 euro to Cozzmoss (decision, Dutch, PDF). Cozzmoss had claimed at one point well over 5000 euro in damages.

A copyright troll is a particularly heinous creature that feeds off accidental copyright infringement by those least likely to defend themselves. It seeks out such infringements and then sends bills claiming preposterous amounts of damages. In countries like the Netherlands, where courts typically claim that damages must actually be proven, the troll then offers the infringer a discount on their trumped up ‘fine’ in the hope it won’t come to a court case. Vermeule was the first Dutch blogger to pass up on that offer.

The rise of copyright trolls in the Netherlands has led to a foundation that helps bloggers with their defense against these creatures, the Stichting Copyright & Nieuwe Media. It’s not clear if the foundation played a part in Vermeule’s defense, nor what part they would have played.

Link: Marketing Facts (Dutch). Image: stolen off the internets, arrr! (Actually, it’s in the public domain.)

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November 27, 2008

Burglars pay child damages for sleepless nights

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:21 pm

Two burglars from Dordrecht have to pay a child 93 euro in damages, a local court decided. After the burglars broke into the child’s home, the child was afraid to sleep in its own bed for fear of the criminals returning, Algemeen Dagblad reports. After the two men were arrested, the parents asked for the symbolic amount in damages.

(Link: Z24 (Dutch))

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June 28, 2008

There is such a thing as illegal downloading, says judge

Filed under: Film,Music,Online by Branko Collin @ 4:14 pm

In a case that at its surface did not seem to have much to do with the legality of downloading music and films, a three-headed court in The Hague has declared that downloading from an illegal source is itself illegal (Dutch). The court baffled observers (Dutch) by failing to specify why it would be illegal, other than referring to a three step European Union test that downloading apparently fails.

The Netherlands has an exemption to copyright that says that copies made for private use are not infringing, regardless of whether the author was paid or not. Originally this law applied at a time when ordinary people could not easily make exact copies, and when negotiating a contract with every author about every copy would have been too much of a burden on all concerned. With the advent of the personal computer and the internet as perfect copying and communication tools this law has come under fire, even though studies show that for instance the average musician suffers no ill consequences from downloading.

In order to pay authors for supposed losses they suffer from private copying, the law allows for authors’ organisations to collect levies from users, for instance by having users pay extra for blank media. These levies are then distributed to the authors. This law suit centered on levies: a rights organization was sued by makers of blank media over the way it calculated the height of levies. One of the questions put to the court was: is downloading a form of private copying? If it is not, then rights organisations have no legal right to raise levies for it. That though for some strange reason was not a conclusion the court was willing to draw. If a law becomes so out of touch with the times that even the professionals don’t know how to apply it anymore, what chances do mere mortals stand?

(The three step test is in Directive 2001/29/EC, paragraph 5: “The [private copying] exceptions and limitations […] shall only be applied in certain special cases which do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work or other subject-matter and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rightholder.”)

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December 27, 2007

Court finds for noisy Tilburg pastor

Filed under: Religion by Branko Collin @ 2:55 pm

A court in Breda has found that Tilburg priest Harm Schilder is allowed to harass his neighbours by ringing his church bells far too loud at early hours. Although the court (LJN: BB8689) recognized that the city had the authority to impose fines and make rules limiting the noise levels its citizens are allowed to reach, it also pointed out that there is state law that overrules city law in this case. Specifically, the “Besluit woon- en verblijfsgebouwen milieubeheer” (Decision Housing and Living Buildings Environmental Management) states that churches are allowed to make as much noise as they want when calling the flock (“1.1.2. Excluded from determining the noise levels are […] the sound required to call one to practice their religion or life philosophy”).

Call me a cynic, but I’ve got a funny feeling that this ruling won’t stand long once the first mosque starts making use of this privilege, and the usual demagogue crowd will start howling “terrorism”.

Via BN/DeStem.

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