Degrading Germany’s Dignity by Narrow-Minded Decisions

On April 17, the criminal proceedings against the single still-alive putative member and four accused co-perpetrators of the German neo-Nazi terrorism group National Socialist Underground (NSU) will start at the Oberlandesgericht (OLG) München. The NSU is, most notably, accused of having exploded a bomb in Köln in 2004, injuring 22 people, committing murders on eight Turkish and one Greek business owners between 2000 and 2006 in various cities of Germany and shooting down two police officers in Heilbronn in 2007, killing one of them. As things are looking today, the proceedings will take place without a single attendant of the victim’s home countries. The OLG has decided to use a meeting room in its own premises that is capable of about 250 people. A significant fraction of those will be occupied by people directly involved into the trial. From the remaining seats, 50 have been reserved for accredited press journalists, the other are intended for the general public. The court says it has assigned the seats for journalists on a first-come-first-serve basis, which caused the available seats to be varnished within minutes. Not a single journalist or state official of Turkey or Greece has thus received a seat. [1] The OLG has since been heavily criticized in public by both, German [2] and Turkish [3] media and politicians but did not reconsider its decision. Furthermore, it did not even accept German journalists whom had been lucky enough to receive a seat, voluntarily giving up upon it in order to enable a Turkish colleague attendance [1].

Update: Installing Molden on 64bit Debian based GNU/Linux Systems

Quite some time ago, I have posted a script that attempts to install Molden. This has become a very popular post but when I read the script again recently, I felt a strong obligation to post a much cleaner way to do things. The following instructions should work for any Debian based GNU/Linux distribution. This includes Ubuntu, but – while in the past, I have been using Ubuntu myself – I cannot recommend it any longer because it does a poor job in respecting your freedom. If you like Ubuntu‘s look & feel but value your freedom, you might want to give Trisquel a try. Anyway, this is about getting Molden to work.

Recent Freedom-Related Supreme Court Decisions in Germany

In this post, I’d like to very briefly discuss a few freedom-related decisions by the Federal Court of Justice of Germany (BGH) and the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (BVerfG) made during this year’s November and December for which I did not have time to publish more thorough discussions earlier. The decisions are ordered by the dates of their press releases (PR) which are sometimes substantially younger than the actual decisions.

Happy Hacking

Photo: Copyright (C) Moritz Klammler 2012; CC-BY-SA 3.0

Chestnut, acorn, wood sticks, bark and beeswax.

European Court of Justice Could Enable Libraries Advancing Against DRM

An interesting lawsuit is currently going on between a German University’s library and a German publisher. The latter wishes to forbid the library digitizing its textbooks and instead force it to buy a licensing agreement for its e-books. The library had been scanning a printed book and provided access to it in PDF format via electronic terminals. Visitors were also allowed to print out the PDFs and even save them to their USB flash drives and take them with them.

The first court to deal with the matter decided that the library is allowed to digitize the books – even if the publisher disapproves of this and offers an alternative licensing agreement – but allowing visitors to take copies with them is not covered by the law. Both parties were appealing against the sentence. The Federal Court of Justice of Germany (BGH), who is now in charge of the lawsuit, has asked the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for an interpretation of the relevant directive and the outcome is totally open again. The ECJ’s decision will probably have an impact on many libraries all across Europe.