An Act – Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025

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This short Act (I have the habit of capitalizing (using uppercase for) Act provides that crypto currency is personal property.

Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025
2025 CHAPTER 29

An Act to make provision about the types of things that are not prevented from being objects of personal property rights.

[2nd December 2025]

Be it enacted by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—
1Objects of personal property rights

A thing (including a thing that is digital or electronic in nature) is not prevented from being the object of personal property rights merely because it is neither—

(a)a thing in possession, nor

(b)a thing in action.

I got this from Joshua Rosenberg’s substack feed A Lawyer Writes, I’m not a paid subscriber. I missed the time when chose in possession and chose in action became thing in possession and thing in action.
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International Women’s Day

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Roll on Friday has a poll on whether giving female staff a pink ice-cream maker on International Women’s Day is a good idea. There are four choices, depending on whether you are male or female.Law firm marks International Women’s Day by sending female clients a kitchen appliance

Toffy Ice Cream Maker

This reminds me of the time in 1989 when the German women’s football team won the European championship and were (each) given a Villeroy & Boch teaset.

Wendy Cope and German

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Wendy Cope’s poetry is so popular that faber published her Complete Poems, first in hardback in 2024, then in paperback in 2025 (Upminster Library didn’t have a copy but it did have several copies of books by Pam Ayres). Her poems are easy to read and often witty, and show a mastery of verse forms. They are also autobiographical. Interviewing Wendy Cope.

In a Guardian article she wrote that in the 1980s she had a love affair with a German poet, who gave her a collection of Heine poems, the Penguin one with English prose translations at the foot of the page. I assume it was Harry Oberländer, who died in 2023, as there is a poem by him on page 215, “Lauda”, translated from the German by the author and Wendy Cope. And “Sonnet of ’68” also by Oberländer (which takes me back to my time as a student in Berlin in 1967/68). Oberländer studied sociology at Frankfurt am Main and met Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer. Assuming several references are to him, he wrote his last book without capitalization.
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Hilla and Berndt Becher

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This weblog is not very legal-translation-based any more – just ruminations about topics, often German, of a retired translator.

The Goethe Institut in London recently presented a film about Hilla and Berndt Becher, by Marianne Kapfer. Made in 2012 but seemingly showed last autumn in Germany. I would like to see it again but can’t find it online (yet). From the Tate:

Who are Hilla and Berndt Becher?

Hilla Becher was a German artist born in 1931 in Siegen, Germany. She was one half of a photography duo with her husband Bernd Becher. For forty years, they photographed disappearing industrial architecture around Europe and North America.

They won the Erasmus Prize in 2002 and Hasselblad Award in 2004 for their work and roles as photography professors at the art academy Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

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Michael Moritz, Ausländer

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Michael Moritz grew up in Wales as the son of Jews who left Germany in the 1930s but many of whose relatives did not escape the holocaust. He was diagnosed with a genetic form of cancer whose risk is greater for male Ashkenazi Jews. This perhaps concentrated his interest in the experiences and emotional life of his parents, which he had little considered when he was growing up. The book is an investigation of his history and life as a Jew.

There is a good extract at Granta.

The threat that so rapidly materialized in 1930s Germany is reflected for Moritz in Trump’s America. What he had heard as a young boy whenever his parents sensed disturbing political trends:

If it did happen, it can happen.
If it did happen, it will happen.
If it did happen somewhere, it can happen here.
It will happen here.

He is applying for German citizenship. One reason is the increasing anti-semitism in the UK, another the access to other EU countries he enjoyed before Brexit.

Part of it reminded me of Uwe Wittstock, Februar 33. Der Winter der Literatur, which shows how the literary life of Germany in Weimar was aggressively attacked in a period of a few weeks.