Help! I’ve been stolen

There I was calmly at home with the laptop, well prepared for the impending winter storm that is going to hit us soon when I got a message from a friend via Facebook telling me that there is a fake twitter account in my name. The message included a link to this account

fake1

At first I didn’t spot it. All I saw was the number of tweets, following and followers were wrong. Then I saw that the text was wrong, before I finally saw the twitter handle was another. Here is my twitter account

real1

Not only had the cheeky bugger stolen my image and my (older) bio but even taken my background too. Damn! He/she has also violated the Creative Commons license for my image of the bottles in the background. No attribution!

He/she has been tweeting since August and only managed 16 tweets. But the last one was just hours ago. Why? Seriously It can’t be that difficult to create a profile – so is to somehow fool my friends? I doubt that would work.

Anyway I filed a complaint with twitter and quickly received a mail with the content

To confirm your identity, fax a copy of your valid government-issued photo ID (e.g., driver’s license, passport) to Twitter

Really!! Not only do I have to prove that I am who I am, but now I have to find two pieces of archaic technology (photocopier and fax) in order to prove who I am.

What this proves is:

  1. Stealing someones likeness and bio is easy online (duh!)
  2. In order to really prove who we are we need to downgrade to pre-internet technology
  3. First world problems are really a drag

 

Fake Books and Valuable Copies

There is something fascinating about book thieves and none are less fascinating than the Marino Massimo De Caro who was the former director of the State Library of Girolamini but is most infamous for his book thefts and forgeries. Apparently this self-taught bibliophile without a college degree managed to become director of the Girolamini Library through political connections and lobbying.
Once there he began sacking the library, occasionally replacing books with forgeries and sometimes merely destroying the records of their existence in the library.
The full extent of the losses is not known — the Girolamini Library lacks a complete catalog — but prosecutors, with some bombast, have compared it to the destruction of Dresden during World War II. In 2012, the authorities recovered more than a thousand library volumes that were found in a self-storage unit in Verona traced to Mr. De Caro.
(Rare Books Vanish, With a Librarian in the Plot, New York Times)
Not content with simply stealing books Mr De Caro also branched out into book forgery. The most famous case is Galileo’s book containing the earliest drawings of the moon.

GalileoForgeries1

These gorgeous works were unfortunately fakes…

GalileoForgery2

…Like many forgers, De Caro acted out of a mixture of greed, envy, and a desire to prove himself to a field he felt did not recognize his talents (De Caro also forged a copy of Galileo’s 1606 Compasso to replace a stolen version). A college dropout, he “held an imperious grudge against people who had spent years studying in libraries,” writes Schmidle. Instead, De Caro had earned an honorary professorship by donating four Galileo editions (presumably genuine) and a chunk of meteorite to a private institution in Buenos Aires…

…De Caro and an accomplice artist aged several bottles of nineteenth-century ink to create the Galileo drawings, using the Florence Sheet as a guide for the seventeenth-century astronomer’s hand. After opening a bottle of red wine, he had his accomplice trace the outline of the moons with the foot of his wineglass. Then they baked the pages in his home oven to age them. It’s hard to believe De Caro’s fake survived scrutiny for over five years, until Wilding began to express his doubts in 2011…

(How a Book Thief Forged a Rare Edition of Galileo’s Scientific Work, and Almost Pulled it Off, Open Culture).

It’s a fascinating tale and it is particularly interesting after having a discussion on the value of books and their place in society and libraries. The value of a book as artifact is carried separately from the information within the book. The information in the book could be almost worthless and easily replicated but the actual replication of the physical format is what we desire.

The concept of property (whose bike is it anyway?)

Property is not an absolute concept. The concept of what property means changes both in time and culture. Different groups and sub-groups value their own property and the property of others. Naturally this makes the definition of property difficult. Roman (Justinian) Law defined property as the right to use and abuse a thing, within the limits of the law (ius utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus iuris ratio patitur).

That is a formalistic definition since it requires limitations to be set within the law. But if we replace the law with the limits set by society then the definition is more fluid but harder to limit.

In recent time the discussion of property has been discussed in relation to the legal, ethical and economic discussions on file sharing. A fundamental part of this discussion has been on the basic idea of digital property and whether copying digital products should be a wrongful act – this is not resolved yet with different subgroups still arguing their standpoints using law and technology to prove their point.

All this is good and well but today I got a more practical lesson in the meaning of property within different social sub-groups.

While browsing in a clothes shop my friends locked bike was stolen just outside the store. My less attractive unlocked bike was left behind. Fortunately we searched the area and found the bike. The thief had lifted the bike and hid it in a nearby ally – apparently planning to come back later to remove the lock.

Part of the experience of living in Göteborg is getting your bike stolen. Most of us have lost more than one. Some people argue that they have lost so many bikes that they actually deserve to “borrow” (a.k.a. steal) a bike when they need one. This means that there is an erosion of the concept of property in relation to bikes.

I know that this is a silly argument but the bike thing really pissed me off.