Is it legal in Germany to shower nude in front of the window for all to see?

I’ve nothing against nudity.  I’m nude quite a lot, especially in the German sauna, sharing space with genders masculine, feminine, and neuter

But there’s a time and space for everything, and this morning, I said to myself, enough’s enough.  Why do we have to avoid our front window every morning because we don’t want to suffer the sight once again of some asscrack who lives in an apartment across the courtyard on the same level as ours drying off his package?

If he were schlendering around the sauna landscape looking for his flip-flops while he flipped and flopped around, I wouldn’t bat an eyelash.

But the window is as a thin layer that separates little from the public space and the private, especially when it’s dark out and you’re standing in a room with all the lights on.

So if it’s normally not legal to be walking around nude in public, is it legal to do so in your own space for all to see?

Do we have to put up with this?  I don’t engage my German-resident readers enough even when I’m blogging regularly, but I’m asking you now: what do you know about cases like this?  Can we do or say anything or is he free to carry on as he pleases?

We all get to play the terrorist on the security theatre stage

You never know when you’ll be called upon to play a minor role in life’s ongoing stage of security theatre.

I found that out yesterday morning after printing out a boarding card at my hotel the morning I left Nuremburg, where I’d been sent for a seminar.  I’d asked the front desk if I could use the lobby computer terminals, but they told me that before they could give me the access password, they’d need a copy of my ID.

OK, I thought – maybe they think I’m going to damage their computer, stuff the wide-screen monitor into my back pocket or cram the desktop tower into my carry-on – whatever.  I just needed to print out that boarding card, so I handed them my passport to copy.

After five minutes online I returned to the desk to say I was through, and could I please have the copy of my passport back.

“Oh, I’m sorry, we can’t do that,” said the cheery young woman behind the counter.  “Under German law, we’re required to hold on to it.”

“But I’m finished,” I said.  “Why do you have to hold onto it?”

With a big smile and a double head-bob, she cheerfully said, “Because just now, you could have been planning a terror attack.”

I was stunned.  Flabbergasted.  I’d say blown away, but the slaughterhouse floor scenes from the smoke-filled Moscow airport terminal suicide bombing are still too fresh in the mind.

“I beg your pardon?” I said. “My passport contains vital personal information.”

“Your document copy is safe with us,” crooned her male colleague.  “We have a locked safe.”

“That’s not the point,” I said, but decided not to press it further, leaving for the breakfast buffet shaking my head.

But while gathering my plateful midst the morning crowd I couldn’t just forget it.  I got to wondering if somehow my information might be stolen sometime over the next 10 years.  I wondered how long they’d hold onto it, whether it would one day be destroyed, and whether I’d receive any notification of that.

So I went back to the desk and asked them how long they intended to keep my passport copy.

“We have to keep it for 10 years,” she chirped.  “It’s the law.”

Stunned again.

“Do you mean to tell me that for five minutes of online time you are going to keep a copy of my most important personal document for 10 years?”

What seemed like farce to me they took as routine.  “It’s the law,” she repeated. “We have to do it.”

“Good,” I said, not wanting to debate the existence or strict interpretation of a law I’d never even heard of.  “In that case, I think you should inform your customers before they use the terminals that their personal information is going to be on the files of your office for 10 years.  If I’d known that, I’d never have bothered.  Never.”

I returned to my breakfast – chewing over the screenplay and script of yet another production of security theatre and how I could have played my role better -   and suddenly realised that I had no proof that I’d logged out.

Carrying out their absurd scenario to its bizarrest extreme, I wondered: what if someone were  sitting at that terminal logged in under my login and password – the one with a hard copy of my passport copy attached to it – and were in the process of sending coded messages to fellow cell members to blow up another airport?  I had no physical proof that my session was over, nor that I’d logged out.  What if nine and a half years from now someone stumbled upon the connection and I’m hauled before a judge and sent to prison for the rest of my life?  Hey, and what if there were some sanity in the way we live our lives, and is it any wonder people my age get nostalgic for times when we all weren’t assumed to be guilty before proven innocent?

Overcoming my desire to just forget the whole thing, that it was nothing but trivial bureaucratic bullshit and really doesn’t matter anyway, I went back to the front desk and said, “Look, I don’t want to belabour the point, but about the Internet thing, could you please print me out some proof of when I actually used the computer, and confirmation of the time I logged out?”

The woman with whom I’d mainly been dealing overheard my request got up from her desk in the tiny office off the main counter.  As she turned to face me I could see her face was bleeding red with rage.  “All right,” she said. “If that’s the way you feel about this, we’ll do it a different way.  You can have your passport copy back.  I’ll just take down its number.”

As she was searching for my passport copy she added, “Never before have I had to deal with anyone who objected so vehemently to this procedure.”

I resisted the urge to remind her that Germany is full of people who put up with crap simply because someone in authority is shovelling it.  But picking up on the word “vehemently” I pointed out to her and the other two desk employees  looking on that I had dealt with them throughout in a calm manner, never once raised my voice, spoke with them in even tones, and was merely asking for something that I felt was my right to possess: my personal information.  “Data protection and privacy is a two-way street,” I told them.

The German justice follow-up: you have to pay a little more

You might recall my friend S, whose story of a run-in with a bunch of hick-town vigilantes two weeks after he arrived in Germany a couple of years ago provoked dozens of comments and feedback on justice, or lack thereof, in this country.

Though he had to pay thousands of euro in fines and court costs, his story didn’t end there.  Turns out that the guy who jumped onto his car and then fell off as my friend was trying to get away from the lynch mob turned around and sued him in a civil case for a few hundred euro for damages for pain and suffering.

A few days ago I showed up in court to lend my friend a little moral support.  In contrast to his opponent, S. was alone,  representing himself because he could no longer afford a lawyer.

Without going too much into the details of nearly two hours of testimony, the other side had three witnesses who all said that S. was speeding like crazy through their neighbourhood.  They claimed that he could have driven around the man, but chose to try to run through him instead.  They also claimed there was nobody else around the car at the time.  All confirmed the man claiming damages was injured on his arm and leg when he fell off the car.

The fact the man had some scrapes and bruises is not in dispute, but their statements went completely against my friend’s testimony.  S. says that before he drove away from the scene, his car was surrounded by neighbours, one of whom tried to pull him out of the car, another who tried to wrench off a side mirror.  That’s when he decided to get the hell out, but that his way was continually blocked by the guy who first jumped on his hood before falling off and getting injured.

So the judge split it somewhere down the middle.  She said the guy claiming damages shouldn’t have been anywhere near the path of the vehicle, so he was partly responsible.  And S. shouldn’t have driven away, so he was also to blame.  He should have tried to get help…without, of course, offering any idea how anyone sitting alone in a convertible surrounded by an angry mob is supposed to do that.

S. has to pay a little over 400 euro for damages and court costs, or about one-third.  The complainant’s legal insurance will pay the other two-thirds.  The judge and the guy’s lawyer said he could of course appeal the decision, but that if he lost, his costs would be many times greater, and he’d have to carry them all on his own.  Because he’s got zero income, they worked it out so that he will pay out the €400  in drips and drabs over the next few months.

My friend was disappointed about the outcome as we hashed it out over coffee and a bite to eat after.  He said: the guy’s got a pretty good little business set-up, eh?  Shake down a few vehicles, get your friends to bullshit for you, get the insurance company to pay the costs.

Though I was sympathetic, I told him, look: it might not have come out the way you wanted it to, but sometimes you just have to pay a price for getting people out of your life and putting bad things in the past for good.  At least it’s less than they were gunning for.

A couple of observations:

The guy would never have taken this to civil court for the piddling amount he was suing my friend for if he didn’t have legal insurance.  It just wouldn’t have been worth his while.  Is legal insurance a good thing?  Not in this case.  It simply clogs up the courtrooms with minor cases that should have better been left to die.

And as my friend S. says, this whole thing isn’t about who’s right and who’s wrong,  it’s about how much money you can negotiate.  I agree with him.  In the end, all it came down to was the money.

By the way…

I realise that not many bother to read comments, but one of the more than 50 that my first post on this attracted was a bit of a hair-raiser.  Read about commenter Keith’s story of German justice here. I tried to convince him to let me feature him in a post of his own, but he didn’t want to.

Power kiting in Hamburg fun til the cops show up

On a sunny and warm summer afternoon the other day I discovered that power kiting is LOTS of fun. With nothing more than a few square yards of lightweight fabric, ultra-thin yet strong cord and a bit of wind, you can have a blast.

A friend of mine has been taking a set of kites of different sizes to Hamburg’s Stadtpark for the last three years. When the wind is strong and steady enough, he’ll strap on a harness and fly a six-square-metre kite that gathers enough wind to pull him along the grass on what looks like a fat-wheeled skateboard.

I was hoping we’d get to see him ride it when I showed up for the first time to watch how it’s done, but the wind wasn’t blowing hard enough, and was never very steady.

But we had a great time anyway. It’s easy to learn and a lot of fun.

That is, it was fun until the cops showed up.

“I think they’re not here to offer us tips on how it’s done,” I said as they got out of their van and strolled toward us.

They were friendly enough about it, but firm.

“You can’t fly a steerable kite in the Stadtpark,” they told us. “You’re only allowed to fly kites that have only one string, not two.”

Hmmm… if we can steer them, isn’t that better than if we can’t?

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that we were right under a runway approach to the Hamburg airport, and they’re afraid one of us might trip, fall and drop not one but both handles while the winds suddenly gust up at that precise moment to rocket the kite about 1000 metres skyward to be violently sucked into a passing jet’s engine, resulting in the agonizing deaths of hundreds of people as they’re consumed in a flaming ball of fire in the ensuing crash over a populated area?

I bet it does.

So we stood around for a while, threw the frisbee back and forth for a bit, packed up the kites, and headed off to grab a pizza and beer.

My friend in the meantime has done a bit of research. Apparently, if your kite weighs less than one kilo and has no metal parts, you can fly it in the Stadtpark.

So there, cops. See you next time it’s sunny and windy.

If you screw up, you could kill someone

By the time I was 19 and started training in McBride, BC, for my summer with the Canadian National Railway, I’d already racked up a long list of jobs from house-builder to ferry deckhand to supermarket stockboy, but none so far boiled down to this: If you screw up, you could kill someone.

That point was hammered home my first day of training with a jovial, red-faced, pot-bellied, silver-haired gent named Jim, who told me the story of why being precise in everything you do on this job was a matter of life and death.

In 1950 the Canadian army was sending troops over to fight in the Korean war.  The troops were often sent west to Vancouver by train, but one of those trains never made it.  It slammed head-on into a passenger train, killing 17 soldiers and four train crew.

Here’s how it happened, or rather, here’s how I heard it, because there are different versions out there.

The train order operator’s job was to pass messages from the train dispatcher to the trains, either at the station before the train left, or as they were rolling past stations down the line, so the train crews knew where they’d be meeting trains coming the opposite direction.   Much of Canada’s mainline train traffic is now double-track, but back then most areas were single-track, with sidings every few miles to pull off and let opposing trains pass.

We’d bang out messages – called train orders -  onto a form as the dispatcher dictated them over the wire, and repeat the order back to him.   The dispatcher would then give the OK that what we’d typed out was correct.  After the dispatcher was sure that all trains had their meeting points planned out, he issued a clearance to attach to the orders and we’d hand it over to the crew.  Back in 1950, even the high-traffic mainline trains between major Canadian cities were still being run this way.

One day an operator, after repeating back a train order, noticed he’d made a mistake, so he threw the order away and typed out a new one.

Unfortunately, he made two critical errors.  He not only wrote the wrong meeting point on the new order he typed out, he failed to repeat the order back to the dispatcher.  Had he repeated the order with the mistake back to the dispatcher, he and the other operators listening in to the repetition would have immediately spotted the wrong meeting point, and he’d have had to go back and type it yet again until he got it right.

As it was, he passed a message along to the passenger train to meet the troop train one station beyond the point the dispatcher thought they would meet.

So the troop train and the passenger train met in the middle – head on, around a curve, in the middle of the Rockies.

The train order operator, a young man only three years older than I was when I started my training, was charged with manslaughter.  In the trial, his lawyer argued that the man was actually being used as a scapegoat, and that the real culprit was the shoddy way the railways were being run.  Standing up in the courtroom, he held the railway rule book high over his head and ripped it to shreds, saying the rules by which the railway was then running trains were unsafe and must be amended.

That’s why on the rule book I was issued it said: Uniform Code of Operating Rules, Revision of 1962 on the cover.  They completely re-wrote the rule book based on that one disaster, resulting in a daily routine for train order operators from then on:

All train orders had to be letter perfect.  All times and all place names had to be spelled out letter-by-letter in the operator’s repetition back to the dispatcher.  And if a mistake were made, you could be charged with a criminal offense if it were found that you’d passed the order to the train without having first repeated it back.

The operator’s lawyer, by the way, was none other than John Diefenbaker, a man who later became Canada’s Prime Minister.

Caveat: I’ve re-told this story as I remember it being told to me.  When looking up for information on what’s known as the Canoe River disaster, you come up with several variations.

Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a trainspotter.

German justice: you may be the victim, you may be right, but you still have to pay

This is a story about how a newcomer to Germany was given a first-hand look at rednecks in this country, and how the law is set up to protect even them.

S. is one of the nicest fellows I’ve met in a long time. Easy manner, loads of friends, always down for whatever. He arrived in Hamburg three years ago to take a job with a major German retail company. After a couple of weeks on the job he was sent to deliver some documents to work colleagues who lived in a small town just east of Hamburg.

It was a warm summer evening, so S. was driving his sporty BMW Z4 with the top down.  He drove around the town a bit trying to find his colleagues’ place, but soon got lost, so he stopped in at the local police station to ask for directions, and was soon on his way again.

That’s when things started to get twisted.

Fifteen seconds after asking for directions, a skinhead jumped in front of his car and blocked his way.  Soon a half-dozen rednecks surrounded him, swearing at him and yelling that he should just get the fuck out of town instead of driving around their place. One of them even climbed up on his hood and wouldn’t get off, another tried to wrench off his side mirror.

Feeling seriously threatened, he hit the door emergency door lock button, but the windows and the top were still down, so one guy was able to reach in and grab him by the collar.   Luckily S. was wearing a seatbelt, so he couldn’t be dragged out of the car.

With a half-dozen men – and one woman -  still braying at him to get out, he did what I think anyone in that situation would have done.  Using the gears and the wheel in a nifty swerve to knock the guy off the hood, he tore off out of there, chased by one of them in another car.

After S. finally got to his destination, his colleagues came out to look at his car.  Just then the same group arrived to hassle him again, this time with reinforcements, as a group of 10 were now threatening to beat up not only S., but his colleagues as well.

Again, he did what I’d do: got the hell out of town, jumping into his car and speeding away.

My friend was angry and upset, but didn’t pursue it further until he received a summons to give a statement with the police.

In the meantime, the man who’d been knocked off the hood had gone to hospital complaining of various ailments, and was charging him with bodily injury.  He said S. had run into him with his car as he was driving like a madman through the centre of town.

In the ensuing court case my friend, who speaks very good German, was able to convince the judge in his testimony that he could not have been driving fast or erratically through the town at the time, because he was trying to find an address in an unfamiliar town, and that’s not how one would be driving if looking for an address.

The judge also dismissed the testimony of the man who accused S. of running into him.   The man had no answer when asked why, if a car had slammed into him, he’d suffered no leg injuries.

So the judge chose not to convict my friend, but in the twisted way German justice works, he still had to pay.

His tormenters got off scot-free, but because S. failed to go to the local police that evening to report the incident, he was forced to pay a fine of €1,200.

“I was not found guilty of anything,” S. says, “No criminal record – but in the ridiculous hodge-podge and horse-trading of German law, I was still asked to pay a fine.”

S. wanted to appeal the fine, but his lawyers said all he’d do  is rack up more legal costs.  His lawyer’s bill with the fine had already climbed to more than €4,000, so he just paid it.

Another twist:

Because the case has only been shelved, and not conclusively ended, S. cannot turn around and charge his tormenters. The case against him has to be officially ended before he can proceed, so his case against the rednecks will probably never be heard.

“It’s a completely bonkers German law which lets criminals slip through the loophole, provided they make the first accusation,” he says.

Cigarettes are junk food, too

Today’s photo:

A billboard for Lucky Strikes seen a while back in Germany, where selling things that are red, black and white can mean a trip to courthouse.  Things proven to lead to deadly diseases are still OK though.  Wouldn’t want to kill all those jobs now, would we?

Protected: Suspected pedophile Oliver Shanti on his way to Germany

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Every ecosystem has its predators and bottom-feeders

The comments on my last post about photos and copyright show that there is a lot of confusion about what images you can put in your blog and still sleep soundly at night.

After all, as I pointed out, there are predators and bottom-feeders out there with jaws poised like a spring-loaded trap, ready to sue your butt at the first sighting of your using any of their photos.  The link to the whole show – it’s the first item – is now in the right-hand sidebar of the show’s site.  It’s near the top under Video, which from my advanced language course I learned is German for video.

But even if you don’t speak German, take a look at the TV segment.  You’ll at least get a close-up view of who I’m talking about.  Have a barf bowl ready, just in case.

The show – and I – recommend using only your own stuff if you want to be 100% protected from these, errr… people.  But safe to some is boring.  What if you want to use somebody else’s work, and still be safe from a lawsuit?

Some hide behind the fair use fig leaf.  As pointed out by timethief – a tireless worker in the thankless and never-ending job of helping out wordpress.com users lost in their chaotic forums – as long as you’re not using it to make money you should be OK.

But where does occasionally using a photo or drawing for illustrative, critical or satirical purposes end, and systematically mining someone’s work for publication on your own blog begin?  Take a look at Comics I don’t Understand.  Actually, a lot of the comics on that site I do understand.  What I don’t get is how they can claim fair use.  His entire concept is based on the work of other people.  I asked him in the comments under a post with a full-colour Garfield cartoon what he does about copyright, but got no answer from the blog author.   Someone else in the comments said that since the site is for comment and criticism of copyrighted work, it’s OK to use it.

Buddy, I hope you have good insurance, because if I were the author of any one of those cartoons, I’d tell you to butt out after three posts of my stuff.  Sure, you might not be out to make a profit, but it’s like having a site entitled Photos I think are, like, bitchin’ and posting the collected works of Annie Leibovitz a little at a time. 

Headbang8 of Deutschland über Elvis says that if you’re a serious amateur blogger, get an el-cheapo subscription to clipart.com, where you can choose from more than nine million illustrations and model-released photos.    The catch with that site is, sure you can download as many gigs worth of images you like in one week for only 15 bucks, but if you don’t use them for the first time within the period of your subscription, you can’t use them unless you take out a new subscription.  To do so would be stockpiling, which is against their rules. 

Simon, a caricaturist based in London, is coming at it from the author’s side.  What to do about his stuff being grabbed and used on other sites?  Simon, if you want to make sure your art doesn’t get stolen, don’t post it on the Internet.  Like others pointed out in the comments, whatever you post is going to be scraped and used elsewhere whether you like it or not.  I’ve bitched and whined about this myself, and all I am is some duff blogger.  I’m slowly getting over myself though.

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Speaking of photos, and since recent events have put me in a giddy mood, I will now break two rules.  One: I am going to go completely off-topic within the same post, and two: post what we had for dinner last night.  Ta-da…..!

Sweetie, just take the picture.  My fingers are burning.

Photos and pizza guaranteed 100% home-made.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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How much is that doggie on the sofa?

I had great laughs this morning reading through B’s latest Eurotrippen post about the celebrity life of her dog, but it also got me thinking about a German TV show I saw on the weekend, which had an item about photos and copyright.

B’s photos are all her own, so she’s free and clear. But what if B didn’t have a dog? What if she had that twisted little idea in her head, but no dog to illustrate it? She could probably find a few pics of doggies dressed in leather and lace and weave a little story around them, right?

Sure, but she’d be putting herself in serious financial peril, not only for the obvious reason that a lot of photos out there have rights on them, but that there are websites out there dedicated to sucking you in to using their photographs on your blog and then turning right around and suing your sorry ass off.

The TV show profiles a couple who started up a little site dedicated to keeping birds as pets. They went a – googling for a few shots of common vegetables so they could brighten up a page on what to feed them. They clicked on one of the top results and found hundreds of photos on the Voldemort of recipe sites, the link to which I not only absolutely refuse to provide, I won’t even mention its name.

If you fail to look for the page that says they don’t give out the photos for free, and take one of their photos for use on your blog, the site tracks the photo’s new location and immediately fires off a bill to you for around €700 euro – or more than one thousand US dollars – per photo! Our pair of budgie boffins were asked to fork over €8600, and they are just one of hundreds the show says the site has already sued.

Since users are most likely to click on the top lines rather than wade through pages and pages of stuff, the shows says the site uses Google-bombing to game themselves into the top ranks of search results. And with more and more people getting into blogging for the first time without a clue as to its many pitfalls, their supply of fresh meat is almost endless.

The experts on the show say that if you don’t want to go to court and risk paying thousands more should you lose, there’s not much you can do besides negotiate the price down. After all, nearly a thousand euro for a fuzzy thumbnail jpeg is pretty outrageous.

So if you want to be like B, do what she does and use your own dog, your own camera, your own frilly clothes, your own electrician’s tape, and your own sofa. That way, the only mess you’ll have to clean up is a few hairs – provided it’s fully housebroken.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: You can tape the show – schade, nur auf Deutsch – in repeat on Wednesday, February 20 around 2345, or Friday the 22nd at 0920 on HR (Hessischen Rundfunk) or simply watch it on the web via the link provided above when they get around to posting it.

PPS: Please see this excellent post on fair use from The Blog Herald, a blog on blogging.

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