[SystemSafety] Current Events

Tue Aug 22 10:21:29 CEST 2023

Peter,

I am very sorry this has happened to you.

There are several companies that have realised an easy way to make money is
to send a bot to crawl the Internet searching for copyrighted images. One
such company is PicRights, which has been engaged by AP. I think we will
see a lot more of this behaviour.

PicRights Ltd: the shady company hounding journalists over historic cases
of copyright infringement | by Shannon Rawlins | Medium
<https://shannonrawlins2000.medium.com/picrights-ltd-the-shady-company-hounding-journalists-over-historic-cases-of-copyright-infringement-a169685eede6>
Copyright Compliance (ap.org)
<https://www.ap.org/contact-us/copyright-compliance>

AP's attitude reminds me of the situation in the UK where hotels, stores
and other businesses have subcontracted parking enforcement to unscrupulous
third parties, then claim that the resulting penalty notices are nothing to
do with them.

The claim that you can use an image in a document that you share for
explicitly scientific purposes with a select small number of other
scientists, but you can't then make that document publicly available on the
Internet is only an opinion, the validity of which can only be established
in a court of law. These companies rely on the fact that it is cheaper to
pay up than to contest in court.

In this instance, I think the damage done to the safety community is far
greater than the supposed loss incurred by AP.

Yours,

Dewi Daniels | Director | Software Safety Limited

Telephone +44 7968 837742 | Email d <ddaniels at verocel.com>
ewi.daniels at software-safety.com

Software Safety Limited is a company registered in England and Wales.
Company number: 9390590. Registered office: Fairfield, 30F Bratton Road,
West Ashton, Trowbridge, United Kingdom BA14 6AZ

On Mon, 21 Aug 2023 at 11:51, Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin <
ladkin at techfak.de> wrote:

> Folks,
>
> my collected research works, as well as those of others in my RVS group at
> Bielefeld, are currently
> archived under www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de . I also run privately a mirror
> site, rvs-bi.de which
> includes an updated WBA Home Page as well as a couple of books I completed
> in late 2017 after my
> formal retirement from the Uni. It does not include any more recent
> papers, such as those I have
> published with the SCSC at SSS'20, SSS'21 and SSS'22, in the SCSC
> eJournal, or those on the law and
> computer-based systems in DEESLR https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr .
>
> We were recently "notified of improper use" (that is a technical term in
> German copyright law) of an
> image by a Hamburg lawyer who was representing AP. He cited the rvs-bi.de
> site, and the image is the
> well-known image of the Concorde taking off from CDG with its left engine
> trailing flames. It was
> used by Bernd Sieker in the slides of his talk to the First Bieleschweig
> Workshop in 2002. It was
> also used in Bernd's Diplom thesis in the next year, which was also on the
> rvs-bi.de site.
>
> I had thought, Bernd had thought, most of my colleagues including those
> working in industry had
> thought, indeed anyone reading §51 of the German copyright law (known as
> UrhG) could use any image
> in a scientific work for the purpose of explaining (part of) that work,
> because those words are in
> there. But, as I have often found in German law, just because law
> expressly says you can, it doesn't
> mean that you can. Both the lawyer I hired as well as the Uni lawyer
> explained that, yes, you can
> use an image in a document that you share for explicitly scientific
> purposes with a select small
> number of other scientists, but you can't then make that document publicly
> available on the Internet
> for the people who paid for your work with their taxes, as RVS did in
> publishing the Bieleschweig
> Proceedings 20 years ago.
>
> Why now? Because there is a business model whereby the WWW is crawled for
> images and the lawyer
> issues the notices and collects the fees. And those crawlers are getting
> ever better.
>
> There are two general steps to this German civil-law process. One is the
> "notice of improper use",
> which cost in this case upwards of €300, and the second is "declaration of
> discontinuance" by means
> of which a violator declares that heshe will not engage in that specific
> behaviour again (in this
> case, that the Uni Bielefeld will not put that image up on a
> publicly-available WWW site ever
> again). This declaration can cost a couple of thousand €. The Uni paid up,
> on the basis that
> rvs-bi.de was a project of the RVS group at the time it was established.
>
> When we were running the Bieleschweig Workshops (2002-2007, again in 2011)
> contributors were putting
> pictures of trains and planes and ships and accidents to them in their
> slidesets. We have to take
> all of those down in Germany now. There are what I consider key
> contributions: the 2003 Siemens
> report which compared WBA with STAMP (now CAST) and showed that CAST
> identified lots of
> organisational-behavioural phenomena with the DB, the German rail service,
> which were not obviously
> causal to the derailment being investigated. Amongst other things, they
> were invariants of DB
> operations and no other trains derailed before or since at that place and
> WBA identified no causal
> connection through the Counterfactual Test. That is still the case, as far
> as I can tell, but not
> acknowledged by STAMP/CAST devotees. Other important contributions were
> the WBA investigation of the
> cascading power outage on the Swiss Railways in 2005; the WBA of the
> Überlingen collision;
> observations of the tensions between legal requirements for assignment of
> responsibility and
> associated protections, and engineering-scientific analysis of causality,
> using the GOL midair
> collision in Brazil and the Lathen maglev-train collision; analysis of the
> Berajondo Tilt-Train
> derailment in Australia. If they are to go back up in an archive, it will
> have to be in another country.
>
> I analysed the rest of the sites for further vulnerabilities. I found two.
> That all took me a number
> of person-days and I am not sure I have everything; Bernd implemented it
> in a few minutes by changed
> file-access permissions on rvs-bi.de.
>
> So what has happened with www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de? Well, the Head
> SysAdmin informed me Friday that
> the faculty had decided to take the entire site down.  He offered to turn
> the site into a zip file
> and offer it for download (it apparently occurred neither to him nor to
> whomever he discussed it
> with (I presume the Dean) that this would be equally a citable tort under
> UrhG). He called this a
> "very good solution". My initial thought was: what is the problem to which
> this is the solution?
>
> The faculty is thus proposing to take down the archives of all of my
> research work over thirty-one
> years, and that of my group members for 22 years.I don't know how quickly
> they intend to do so. I
> have pointed out to the Dean that all of that work was paid for with
> public money and should be made
> available to the public, Indeed, in the US that is a requirement of any of
> the USG research
> contracts I worked on, and it is HMG policy in the UK that there shall be
> open access to research
> paid for by HMG (it might even be law now - can someone say?).  I don't
> think the current form of
> www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de is apposite as an archive (there is material
> that does not need archiving,
> and some that is already archived elsewhere) but no alternative was
> offered to me on my formal
> retirement. It was, until the recent brouhaha, zero maintenance. Now,
> total maintenance
> corresponding to the lawyercrawling amounts to 10-15 person-minutes. Gosh,
> that's a lot, isn't it,
> over 6 years?
>
> The point for the List is that I worry that the System Safety Mailing List
> is likely to come up
> again. If this stuff with the WWW pages turns into a fight (i.e., if I
> disagree in any way with what
> the faculty proposes to do) then I suspect reasons will be found to close
> the mailing list. Both
> Chris in Belfast and Mike at SCSC offered to help. If those offers are
> still on the table, I think
> it's time to take them up and to move it.
>
> PBL
>
> Prof. i.R. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
> Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de
>
>
>
>
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