Samtycke.nu

Från: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] För Rixstep Legal Skickat: den 16 februari 2012 02:51 Till: Sandra Kastås Harald Ullman Ullman PR AB Katarinavägen 22, 4 tr 116 45 Stockholm It has come to our attention that the website Nordic News Network, with which you are associated according to Dagens Media, features unattributed copyrighted works, to which we own the copyright. Specifically but not exclusively: the police protocols, translated into English Whilst these materials have been slightly altered from their original form, the plagiarism is clear. This is our intellectual property, created over one year ago. It has been stolen from our website by your associate. One of many examples: the delineating headers are identically placed and essentially identical. They were created during our translation, by us. They did not exist in the original materials. Additionally, the colloquial use of the words 'cabbie' and 'jumper' are unique to our translation, and as those words aren't used in American English, it stretches the imagination that Mr Al Burke, an American, would have happened upon them coincidentally if he weren't simply tweaking our original work. These are but a few examples. There are countless others. And we fear your associate is not intelligent enough to disguise his intentions, should he decide to try again. The 'modus operandi' he uses is painfully transparent. We're confident any court of law would quickly grasp what had happened here. These translated protocols (over 30,000 words) were the product of 90+ hours of work over a grueling five day period. They were produced for the common good - not so someone could unconscionably steal the material and profit by it as Burke has done. The pages state clearly, in addition to the copyright notice found at the bottom of each and every one of the thousands of pages at the website: The materials on this page and linked by this page are copyright Rixstep with all rights reserved. Redistribution allowed only for non-commercial purposes. Civil action may be taken against violators that can result in severe penalties. We regard the use by Mr Burke as 'commercial purpose'. The person publishing this stolen material was obviously trying to hide the fact that the material was stolen and not his own work. That can only lead to one conclusion. It is in any case illegal. Those materials are not free to use without attribution, as I'm sure you understand, and as our websites clearly indicate. In this case, they are not free to use at all. Certainly not for Mr Burke. They're already available at our website, where we have published over 400 articles in support of Mr Assange and WikiLeaks this past one and one half years, whilst your 'friend' published but one. We are also aware that your friend at NNN has been crawling the Internet and stealing materials willy-nilly from a great number of websites in addition to ours, all in a rather daring fashion. This has been repeatedly highlighted at forums. This is not permitted. And should other IP holders become aware of what Mr Burke has done, you yourself and your bureau (and Mr Assange as well) will look bad. And we're sure this isn't what you want. And as professional translators who have worked in the business for more than fifteen years, in addition to teaching Cambridge Certificate English, we can tell you that your 'business partner' is doing you and Mr Assange a grave disservice: the recorded interrogations were meticulously transcribed by someone in the police department – and equally meticulously translated by us. Please see here: <http://rixstep.com/1/20110130,02.shtml> 'The roughest parts were the transcripts. Transcripts are the next best thing to being there - to having a video recording. The task of the transcriber is to record every non-word, sound, and pause in addition to the actual content, this to as accurately as possible convey the attitude and reactions of the interviewee. 'Good translations normally never attempt a 'word for word' approach. It's not only words that differ in different languages - it's the ideas and concepts as well. The goal of a translator is otherwise to get the idea across rather than produce stilted language no one really grasps. But the translations of the transcripts necessarily took another approach: reproduce all the commas, full stops, ellipses, and even the strange constructs as found in the originals.' Your friend has simply taken out the difficult parts as they can't be varied enough so the plagiarism isn't painfully embarrassing even to the untrained eye - but in so doing, the nuances in the interviews are lost forever to the reader. Such a disservice could cause Mr Assange grave harm. Your friend doesn't seem to be high on ethics or care for Mr Assange, someone we have a very strong reputation for supporting. Please have your associate remove these illegal materials from his website. Please do not use his illegal materials yourself or in any way link to them. We are also making contact with the presence provider of Nordic News Network, so those links might not be good much longer anyway. Please choose your business partners more carefully in the future. The fate of Mr Assange is something we all care deeply about. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter, Mr Ullman. We shall in the interim be consulting with our legal advisers in the Stockholm area to discuss what judicial avenues we might pursue should we encounter further difficulty. Från: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] För Rixstep Legal Skickat: den 16 februari 2012 23:38 Till: Sandra Kastås Ämne: Re: Notice of Copyright Infringement Please forward this to your associate Burke. It's from our CFO. Thank you. I'm going to be quite blunt. You have plagiarised an original work, and we expect you to remove it from your website immediately. Please don't equivocate and admit to copying headers but insist on having translated the rest of the text yourself. No one will believe such a ridiculous claim. The field of forensic linguistics is extremely accurate. But it doesn't take a forensic linguist to see what you have done. If you continue to insist that the work you have published is an original work, we will be forced to enlist the work of such a professional, and your unethical and far from journalistic activities will be revealed to everyone. That is not our goal, however. Our goal is to preserve the integrity of our work and prevent copyright infringement. I very strongly suggest that you take this opportunity to quietly save face. This is the only request we will make. Our next step will not be a request, nor will it be private or free from legal, professional, and reputational ramifications. Remove our work from your site. Do not infringe on our copyright again. This action must be completed by Friday, 17 February at 17:00 Swedish local time.

Source: http://samtycke.nu/doc/new/rix-burke.pdf