Yesterday, the widely-reported case relating to the hostile takeover of Mannesmann by Vodaphone began. Simon’s Blawg links to an English article in The Times. It’s reported as one of the biggest cases in Germany since WWII, and as a test of whether Germany is prepared to adapt to Anglo-American business ideas.
Here’s a later article in the Financial Times.
Six famous defendants are charged with ‘Untreue in einem besonders schweren Fall’ – a serious case of criminal breach of trust. They were paid lump sums of a total of 57 million euros.
Der Stern has articles in German.

Today, the European Court of European Rights held that it was a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights when Germany seized property from its citizens in the east after reunification in 1990. (Via Expatica)

This decision relates to land awarded to east Germans after 1945. A later decision will deal with land seized between 1945 and 1949, before the GDR came into existence and effectively under Soviet control.

In 1992, Germany expropriated the land without compensation. Up to 70,000 former GDR citizens are affected.

Here is a summary; the case itself should be on that site in English and French, but the links aren’t working at the moment. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung has an article (in German), together with a

Steve Maas has a new translation weblog with an emphasis on the translation business and starting out as a freelance. He must also be a German-English translator.

When I posted on John Cage’s 4’33” recently, I did think to myself ‘I couldn’t have written that’.

Now Friedrich Lenz has an entry discussing the issue of copyrighting silence. He concludes that the work is protected by trade mark concepts. He also gives a link to the Wikipedia entry on John Cage, which has further information on this work and on Cage’s visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard University (he was disappointed to find he heard things).

From January 1, 2004, the requirements of invoices presented in Germany have changed. This came up in the comments to an earlier entry that mentioned an article on the BDÜ website. These requirements apply particularly if you want to set off an invoice against VAT.

First query: what form of electronic signature will be accepted? Does it require extra hardware or would one of the two or three forms of signature in Adobe Acrobat suffice?

It looks to me as if you do need the hardware, so I will go back to sending invoices on paper and wait for more advice. Here is some information in German).

Another requirement is that invoices are numbered consecutively. Information for German lawyers in two PDF files (here and here) at the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer site is partly relevant to translators. (via Vertretbar.de) There is a transitional period until 30 June 2004 in which this rule need not be followed. (Does this period apply to the electronic signature too?)

The Times Online law section today (registration should be free) has a big section for students today, including information on barristers/solicitors, traineeships/pupillages, applications, media law, magistrates’ legal advisers, and also ‘the top ten’ legal thrillers. The term ‘justices’ legal adviser’ was new to me; it apparently means anyone who is doing the kind of things a justices’ clerk does but is not a clerk – so presumably there is one Clerk to the Justices per court, and the rest are trainees or legal advisers. A Google search produced a lot of documents that assumed the term was known, as did a search at the Department for Constitutional Affairs.
(Via Handakte WebLAWg)