cruel to be kind

I can actually see a reason for the new Technorati feature of WTF – especially since some German topics have been popping up in the Technorati hitlist for some time. And as most blog content around this will be in German and not in English, you readers with just English knowledge will have a hard time understanding what is going on.

So, I wrote my first WTF on Technorati to explain the current searches for Marions Kochbuch and for your information here as well ;) You should still go and vote for it of course. ;)

This new hype in the German blogosphere is mearly about a women and her cookbook site (which has tremendously good google juice and both owners seem to be living out of the money.)

The searches on Technorati pop up (like the recent StudiVZ) because the owners of Marions Kochbuch are sending out written warning letters to bloggers. First it was about the most expensive bredroll = blogger took a photograph from the website and put it on their blog – without licence from the photographer.

6000 Euros is the value for it and people go on about “but a bredroll only costs 0,15 Euros!” totally neglecting or ignoring copyright laws. As there has been much discussion about sending out these kind of letters with overpriced notes to it (German parliament is already talking about this and saying something like that for first offenders should not be higher than 50 Euros), this gets hyped a lot.

Most bloggers forget that their little adsense money already puts them out of the “i am a personal blogger!” category and into a business website – which means other laws apply.
Additionally to the “Abmahn”-topic itself it occurred that the owners of the site have already made such letters to bloggers / forum owners before which fuels the conspiracy theory of “they are only out for the money! They could have asked us and we would have taken it down”.

The owners replied somewhere that they do not have all day long to catch all of those which is why they got into using a lawyer.

This gets new fuel as the lawyer started sending such letters out to bloggers who where merely discussing the incident and as an interesting sidenote seems to try to sent the coming court dates to Hamburg. This is of interest as court in Hamburg has made a ruling about liability of forum postings and the owner of a forum.

So this is not only about a bredroll, but is going to be interesting because of whatever ruling will come out of it, it should have a significant impact on how blogs and their comments are to be seen legally.

And it might actually teach some people about basic rules of copyright and licensing …

Reading this you actually can understand what this entry is about – although it is in a different language alltogether. Which is something posts like WTF is Technorati up to? by ZDnet miss when they compare this feature with Digg and alike.

It is not about digging something, but explaining something. Of course it would have been clever to implement a language switch in there as well (you can’t judge by the author which language it is but I would be willing to tell you in which language this is written), but a step towards a more understanding and helping internet. ;)

Tag(s): Marions Kochbuch, wtf, where is the fire, technorati

Tags: european view