[SystemSafety] Current Events

[Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin]

Folks,

my collected research works, as well as those of others in my RVS group at Bielefeld, are currently 
archived under www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de . I also run privately a mirror site, rvs-bi.de which 
includes an updated WBA Home Page as well as a couple of books I completed in late 2017 after my 
formal retirement from the Uni. It does not include any more recent papers, such as those I have 
published with the SCSC at SSS'20, SSS'21 and SSS'22, in the SCSC eJournal, or those on the law and 
computer-based systems in DEESLR https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr .

We were recently "notified of improper use" (that is a technical term in German copyright law) of an 
image by a Hamburg lawyer who was representing AP. He cited the rvs-bi.de site, and the image is the 
well-known image of the Concorde taking off from CDG with its left engine trailing flames. It was 
used by Bernd Sieker in the slides of his talk to the First Bieleschweig Workshop in 2002. It was 
also used in Bernd's Diplom thesis in the next year, which was also on the rvs-bi.de site.

I had thought, Bernd had thought, most of my colleagues including those working in industry had 
thought, indeed anyone reading §51 of the German copyright law (known as UrhG) could use any image 
in a scientific work for the purpose of explaining (part of) that work, because those words are in 
there. But, as I have often found in German law, just because law expressly says you can, it doesn't 
mean that you can. Both the lawyer I hired as well as the Uni lawyer explained that, yes, you can 
use an image in a document that you share for explicitly scientific purposes with a select small 
number of other scientists, but you can't then make that document publicly available on the Internet 
for the people who paid for your work with their taxes, as RVS did in publishing the Bieleschweig 
Proceedings 20 years ago.

Why now? Because there is a business model whereby the WWW is crawled for images and the lawyer 
issues the notices and collects the fees. And those crawlers are getting ever better.

There are two general steps to this German civil-law process. One is the "notice of improper use", 
which cost in this case upwards of €300, and the second is "declaration of discontinuance" by means 
of which a violator declares that heshe will not engage in that specific behaviour again (in this 
case, that the Uni Bielefeld will not put that image up on a publicly-available WWW site ever 
again). This declaration can cost a couple of thousand €. The Uni paid up, on the basis that 
rvs-bi.de was a project of the RVS group at the time it was established.

When we were running the Bieleschweig Workshops (2002-2007, again in 2011) contributors were putting 
pictures of trains and planes and ships and accidents to them in their slidesets. We have to take 
all of those down in Germany now. There are what I consider key contributions: the 2003 Siemens 
report which compared WBA with STAMP (now CAST) and showed that CAST identified lots of 
organisational-behavioural phenomena with the DB, the German rail service, which were not obviously 
causal to the derailment being investigated. Amongst other things, they were invariants of DB 
operations and no other trains derailed before or since at that place and WBA identified no causal 
connection through the Counterfactual Test. That is still the case, as far as I can tell, but not 
acknowledged by STAMP/CAST devotees. Other important contributions were the WBA investigation of the 
cascading power outage on the Swiss Railways in 2005; the WBA of the Überlingen collision; 
observations of the tensions between legal requirements for assignment of responsibility and 
associated protections, and engineering-scientific analysis of causality, using the GOL midair 
collision in Brazil and the Lathen maglev-train collision; analysis of the Berajondo Tilt-Train 
derailment in Australia. If they are to go back up in an archive, it will have to be in another country.

I analysed the rest of the sites for further vulnerabilities. I found two. That all took me a number 
of person-days and I am not sure I have everything; Bernd implemented it in a few minutes by changed 
file-access permissions on rvs-bi.de.

So what has happened with www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de? Well, the Head SysAdmin informed me Friday that 
the faculty had decided to take the entire site down.  He offered to turn the site into a zip file 
and offer it for download (it apparently occurred neither to him nor to whomever he discussed it 
with (I presume the Dean) that this would be equally a citable tort under UrhG). He called this a 
"very good solution". My initial thought was: what is the problem to which this is the solution?

The faculty is thus proposing to take down the archives of all of my research work over thirty-one 
years, and that of my group members for 22 years.I don't know how quickly they intend to do so. I 
have pointed out to the Dean that all of that work was paid for with public money and should be made 
available to the public, Indeed, in the US that is a requirement of any of the USG research 
contracts I worked on, and it is HMG policy in the UK that there shall be open access to research 
paid for by HMG (it might even be law now - can someone say?).  I don't think the current form of 
www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de is apposite as an archive (there is material that does not need archiving, 
and some that is already archived elsewhere) but no alternative was offered to me on my formal 
retirement. It was, until the recent brouhaha, zero maintenance. Now, total maintenance 
corresponding to the lawyercrawling amounts to 10-15 person-minutes. Gosh, that's a lot, isn't it, 
over 6 years?

The point for the List is that I worry that the System Safety Mailing List is likely to come up 
again. If this stuff with the WWW pages turns into a fight (i.e., if I disagree in any way with what 
the faculty proposes to do) then I suspect reasons will be found to close the mailing list. Both 
Chris in Belfast and Mike at SCSC offered to help. If those offers are still on the table, I think 
it's time to take them up and to move it.

PBL

Prof. i.R. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de