According to The Register, a British coach driver set fire to Germans’ towels on the Italian Riviera in order to make sun loungers available to British holidaymakers:

Glyn Bowden, 55, was driver for 55 South Wales tourists at at Viana Marina near San Remo. He yesterday recounted how the Germans “put their towels on the best sunbeds on the private beach and by a nearby pool”, much to the chagrin of the British party, The Daily Mail reports.

The situation escalated and Bowden set fire to the towels. He was arrested and about to be charged for criminal damage, but he was released after two hours at the request of the hotel, which owned the towels.

Here’s the original Daily Mail report. I tend to agree with the first three comments there: the Germans get up very early, and that’s why they are seen to do this – something other nations do too. And there’s nothing to stop you removing a towel and releasing the sun bed. (See earlier entry on Ralf Höcker’s book)

But the tabloid papers love to fan the flames of this one.

On the other hand, when I go to the local sauna, there is a women’s room with about 30 loungers. The last time I went, six people were lying there and all the other loungers had towels on them. Of course, they didn’t know I am British.

(Thanks to Trevor)

Medien, Internet und Recht reports on a case before the Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht (Hamburg Higher Regional Court – scroll down to download the full judgment as a PDF file) where someone had applied for an interim injunction and then withdrew the application and immediately made it at another court. This, it held, might be an abusive form of “forum shopping”, using the English term. It might refute the presumption of urgency. In other cases, forum shopping is permissible.

From the judgment:

In diesem Verhalten liegt nach Auffassung des Senats ein Fall missbräuchlichen “forum-shoppings“, welches die Dringlichkeitsvermutung
des § 12 Abs. 2 UWG – und damit den Verfügungsgrund der gewählten Verfahrensart entfallen lässt.

One would have expected des missbräuchlichen Forum-Shopping instead of missbräuchlichen “forum-shoppings”. Apparently these people can’t even get their Denglish right. Actually, it comes up four times in the genitive, twice with the S and twice without.

MIR explains in a footnote:

Unter dem Begriff “forum shopping” (engl. wohl “Gerichts Einkaufsbummel”) versteht man das zielgerichtete Auswählen eines Gerichts, welches dem Antrag oder der Klage mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit stattgeben wird. Vorraussetzung ist die konkurrierende Zuständigkeit mehrerer Gerichte, welche insb. bei unerlaubten Handlungen im Internet – auf Grund des sog. “fliegenden Gerichtstandes” – gegeben ist.

Dietl has:

forum shopping (IPR) Zuständigkeitserschleichung; Suche nach einem günstigeren Gerichtsstand (Wahl des für den Kläger günstigsten Gerichtsstands [bei konkurrierender Zuständigkeit mehrerer Gerichte])

Hanseatisches OLG, Urteil vom 06.12.2006 – Az. 5 U 67/06

(Via Handakte WebLAWg)

Green Dot masquerading as blue.

Der Grüne Punkt
IPKAT reports a decision by the Court of First Instance of the European Communities. It held that the Green Dot – Duales System Deutschland – acted abusively when it collected a blanket fee for all packaging marked with a green dot, when some of that packaging was either not collected for recycling, or collected for recycling by other organizations.
The case is T 151/01.

Decision EN
Decision DE
Decision EN and DE

Press release EN

According to the Commission’s Article 82 decision, DSD abused its dominant position within the meaning of Article 82 of the EC Treaty when it claimed the full fee for use of its Green Dot trademark in situations where it provides no service because the collection and recycling is carried out by competitors. The underlying principle followed by the Commission is “no service, no fee”.
In the Commission’s view, the licence fee requirement means that customers have no realistic economic possibility of contracting with competitors of DSD. Whilst paying for the service provided by DSD’s competitors, these customers would have to either pay an additional fee to DSD, or they would have to organise separate packaging, distribution and merchandising lines (packaging with and without the Green Dot).

IPKAT wonders why the case has not been more widely reported. It is a holiday weekend, of course – Whitsun here, Late Spring bank holiday in the UK, and something in the USA too, but the decision was on Thursday.

Uncle Jazzbeau has resurfaced at epea pteroenta.

Via a comment on Trevor’s site, I found another translator’s weblog, and thence others.

Translator Power (Empowering Translators: From Freelancer to Entrepreneur – Opportunities, Marketing, Resources)

Language Realm blog by Roger Chriss – I had just removed his Language Realm from my list as a dead link, but didn’t know about the blog.

¿Se habla English? by Jo-Hanna Goettsche

There’s something about translation… by a translator in London who has mysteriously taken the Naked Translator name and who attended the ITI conference in April too, but I didn’t see anyone naked there. At all events she described the corpora session for me.

Hacklog: Blogamundo by Patrick Hall, Jonas Galvez and John Hall

Maremagnum by Pilar T. Bayle

Into Spanish Translation Blog

mite – Diese kostenlose deutschsprachige Zeiterfassungssoftware im Internet scheint mir sehr interessant. Text & Blog beschreibt es auf Deutsch.

For some years I’ve been using TimeSlice to record how much time I spend on various jobs. I just switch it on and it records till I stop it. It will calculate charges, but since I rarely charge by time that is usually of no interest. What I do is to charge by quantity but use the time tracker program to check how much I earn per hour on various types of translation.

mite is a free-of-charge German-language online time tracker. I like its simplicity (I’ve tried it for a few days). I don’t like the fact that it’s online and that it is integrated in a web browser, because I wonder what happens if the browser crashes. Everything else about it I like for the simplicity of using it (once you’ve worked it out) and creating reports.