[SystemSafety] RVS is apparently gone

[Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin]

Participants may remember that in 2023 my/our WWW pages were the subject of an "Abmahnung" (a legal 
warning letter that comes with costs) that we were publishing pictures to which we may not have the 
rights. These were mostly in the slides to a series of Workshops that we ran from 2002-2007 called 
the Bieleschweig Workshops. We had a number of industry participants in those workshops and 
everything talk or paper that someone in industry produces goes through their legal department 
before it goes out. I assume those people had appropriate rights to the pictures they used, but they 
didn't hand them on to us. And so we couldn't prove we had the rights to put them on the WWW.

On the rvs-bi.de WWW pages, which are a mirror of the RVS site we set up in the teens when it was 
not clear to me that the RVS WWW site was going to persist beyond my retirement, we shut off access 
to the Bieleschweig Workshop slidesets and also a couple of other individual items. However, my 
faculty just left everything open.

A couple of weeks ago, the Uni got another Abmahnung for a picture, this time in the slideset of the 
then-senior safety manager at a marine classification society who was reporting on the results of a 
EU project in which they had been involved. We didn't think to get the rights from him. Nobody in 
the Uni is actually talking to me or including me on emails. I called up the paralegal who was 
dealing with it, but he is now on vacation. My faculty hasn't emailed me or talked to me. They just 
shut off the rvs.uni-bielefeld.de WWW pages.

So that's over two decades of my/our scientific writings and the Compendium of computer-related 
incidents to commercial aircraft up to 2007 which are no longer available. Just gone.

For anybody who has a full URL to something at rvs-uni-bieiefeld.de, you can get the same item 
(apart generally from slidesets of the Bieleschweig Workshops) by substituting the domain name " 
rvs-bi.de" . However, the navigation on rvs-bi.de does not work (I've been trying to find somebody 
who can fix that, but so far have not succeeded - the latest candidate backed out this week after he 
said he'd do it).

It doesn't feel good to have to say goodbye just like that to well over two decades of products of 
my career. Compare with the support available at MIT for the STAMP/CAST/STPA workshops each year.

PBL

Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin
Causalis Limited/Causalis IngenieurGmbH, Bielefeld, Germany
Tel: +49 (0)521 3 29 31 00