Articles about Technology

One e-mail for 20 Eurocents

A long time ago, the German government presented a new idea: A reliable e-mail system, so that e-mails could be used for business communication. The name of this system is DE-mail and it is planned to include only a few certified e-mail providers.

One DE-Mail will Cost 20 Cents

However, Deutsche Post—one of the providers—now introduced they will charge your account with 20 Eurocents. Compared to a normal e-mail this is exactly 20 Eurocents more, because many e-mail providers offer accounts for free.

Compared to a standard letter with Deutsche Post for 55 Eurocents, this is much cheaper, but for only the transfer of some bits it is a lot. Of course this also depends on how many people will use the service and how many mails will be sent. Other providers meanwhile said they while make it cheaper. German ISP 1&1 mentioned 15 Eurocent, but they also added that “values of Eurocents were possible”.

Deutsche Post Failed with Lifetime e-mail

Some years ago, Deutsche Post wanted to start a service offering an e-mail account for your whole life, which also failed. The service was started in 2000 and stopped in 2005, because the “synergy effects they had hoped for did not become real”. Deutsche Post back then wanted to extend this system—for premium users—in a similar way as DE-mail by introducing “electronical certified mail”.

When the whole system did not work, Deutsche Post wanted to earn more money by offering advertisment free inboxes for paying customers. I am not sure, if POP3 was not common in 2003 or they added advertisment directly into the e-mail (like other e-mail providers do nowadays), but the idea didn’t seem to work.

Courts already Accepting normal e-mail

While the introduction of DE-mail is taking more and more time, courts are already starting to accept the normal e-mail system. This can of course be seen both positive or negative, but it is one big strike against DE-mail. If you have the choice between a free e-mail or a 20-Eurocent e-mail, both of them being legally accepted suficiently reliable, then the decision should be clear.

The Higher Regional Court Düsseldorf has accepted informational e-mails of an esteem agent as chargeable (the defendant has bought the house and therefore the treaty with the agent became legal).

A more discussable and maybe also ridiculous case is the judgement of the Regional Court Hamburg, which says that people have to anticipate written warnings via e-mail. This is of course a bit a problem, because many mails get just filtered by junk filters and the recipient does not know there should be such an e-mail.

For such cases (written warnings), a DE-mail could be useful, but who would open up an account just to wait for e-mails harming him?

Possible Surveillance

Due to several surveillance laws in the past months and years, there might be the possibility that the state wants to use this new method to gather easier access to sent and received e-mails. According to my knowledge end-to-end encryption should be supported, but only few people really use it. Therefore, the state would be able to reach business e-mails through only a few big providers.

The e-mails will be encrypted on the server, but this is only a encryption in the backend with the provider’s key. Therefore, the provider could also decrypt it easily and when the state forces the provider to do so, there is no way around it. If people use free providers then it is more complicated for the state, because he does not know all providers.

How IT Companies try to Circumvent Democracy

Recently there has been a decision about another special duty for being allowed to create private copies of media. This time it’s about computers, but not all computers. Currently, there are already duties on CD / DVD writers, the discs and hard drives which are then given to copyright associations, e.g. for music or text. It is a strategy of the German entertainment industry to denigrate each type of copy (they do not mention private copy, but they neither exclude it) and then demand compensation for the damage these “evil” private copies do to them.

However, this case is not about entertainment industry, at least not mainly. It rather is about companies who follow these claims just to achieve a better balance sheet at the end of the term. Even worse is that these huge companies also want to force other companies to do the same.

The range between 13 and 30 €

It has already begun some years ago with law suits between entertainment industry and PC manufacters. The entertainment industry claims they have a right on duties on each sold computer, which leads to a problem for the computer manufacters: They have to retain money just in case they lose and have to pay.

I read the number of 30 euros in a news paper, which they wanted to get rid of. It is a really huge difference if a company has to save 30 € per sold computer or ca. 13 €. Therefore, some major companies wanted to stop the law suits and sign a treaty with the ZPÜ, an association for copyright holders.

Working committee in their way

Yet, the working committee of the German association for IT, tele-communication and new media (BITKOM) was in their way. A report mentioned that 1 € was enough, but of course this offer was refused by ZPÜ. Therefore, the needed 2/3 majority could not be reached in a democratic voting. Since there would have been a normal majority, the executive committee tried to sign the treaty itself, luckily being stopped by two other IT companies.

The solution was the foundation of a new association called Federal Computer Manufacters Association (BCH). It seemed a bit strange when media reported that there had been a agreement between BCH and ZPÜ, because nobody had ever heard of BCH before—and now it’s clear: The BCH has been formed by seven companies who wanted to sign this treaty.

ZPÜ using its position

Instead of being confident the ZPÜ is now trying to use their advantage and demand even more duties on “similar devices”. This could mean a lot, but according to Frank Brunen, CEO of Belinea and opponent of the high duty, probably devices like “USB sticks, mp3 players etc. etc.” are meant.

Moreover, the BCH is trying to confuse people by mentioning that “PC manufacters and importers” now had to pay about 13 € for each sold computer to the ZPÜ. This was understood by some media as if each manufacter now had to pay 13 €. However, according to Brunen’s lawyer, BITKOM is in charge of the negotiations and a great number of participants would be needed to make it obligatory for everybody and these seven major companies—even though it’s Acer, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Medion, Samsung und Sony—are not even an average number.

Moreover, BITKOM wants to change its rules to require only normal majorities for such changes. This is done due to the huge pressure that these major companies have on the association paying much money to BITKOM. If BITKOM signed this treaty, this would be a huge defeat for the small PC retailers etc., because they are said to have good chances at Federal Court.

Federal Cross of Merit for IT-developer

Something that might be interesting for information scientists: The German IT-developer Matthias Ettrich received the Federal Cross of Merit on November 6, 2009 for his work on KDE - a desktop environment for the open source operating system Linux. Matthias Ettrich founded KDE in 1996 as Kool Desktop Environment. Called K Desktop Environment nowadays, it is - together with Gnome - one of the most important desktop environments for Linux.

He received a lower level medal, but this still is a huge honor I think. Usually, you only get to know that soldiers receive the Cross of Merit. However, there are also other IT-developers or similar who receive such crosses - I just do not know about them. Using a search engine I was able to find a mechatronic engineer called Bernd Gombert.