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Story of the month ...

February 2010: In my Story of the Month for October 2009 I reported on tensions between passengers on an airplane caused by one passenger doing something that was perfectly her right to do but nevertheless annoyed another passenger (sitting behind the first one): tilting her seat back as far as possible. We all have experienced similar situations. In the story, I reflected on how little is sometimes needed to turn a peaceful situation into conflicts, tension, and bad feelings.

At the end of January/beginning of February 2010, a seemingly peaceful situation turned into a conflict with severe consequences just because I indicated that I might exercise a right I believe to have - as minor as tilting my seat in an airplane. Over the years, I had maintained web pages that served as a workbench for the Global Geodetic Observing System. I had bought the URL iag-ggos.org and developed work pages there. Over time, I include material on what GGOS was all about, and much more. I did this, because the GGOS Chair never was able to develop official GGOS web pages that provided up-to-date information on GGOS or documented what was happening in GGOS. And I always made very clear that I developed, designed, and maintained these pages without any public support or support from other GGOS participants. Consequently, I considered these pages as "my" GGOS pages. In 2008, the IAG President actually confirmed this indirectly, because he postulated that anything significant put into the public by GGOS needs the endorsement of the IAG Executive Committee - thus, since "my" pages did not have this endorsement, they definitely could not be considered GGOS pages. Triggered by the IAG President's guideline, early in 2008 I put a note on the web pages stating that they were not official but rather my private pages in GGOS, and I also added a copyright note making clear that either myself or somebody else had copyright for these pages and the material made available through them.

After a brief discussion in December 2009 with the GGOS Chair, who obviously just had discover my copyright note, on January 25, 2010 I sent a mail to the GGOS Executive Committee and explained the reasons for the copyright note on the iag-ggos.org pages. With this, I obviously "tilted my seat to the maximum", and an intense shaking of my seat started from the back rows. The IAG President immediately objected to the copyright and stated that these pages belonged to IAG - contradicting all his earlier statements about the need for IAG EC endorsement. He (and others) referred to unwritten rules that in the IAG and GGOS everything could be freely exchanged and people would not claim copyrights. Then, on January 27, 2010, a BKG staff member sent an e-mail to a group stating that a "GGOS Test Site" had been released. A very brief check showed that most of the contents of this test site were copied from my pages, ignoring the copyright note there. Moreover, this "GGOS Test Site" had a note stating that copyright was with IAG. Quite some seat shaking, I would say. I reacted the same day by sending a personal e-mail to the BKG President, requesting that the test site was being disabled. Obviously, I had discovered a way of tilting my seat even more: The next day, this mail was distributed by the same BKG staff member to the same group saying that the "GGOS Test Site" had been disabled (which wasn't true, by the way). Distributing my mail to the President of BKG to others really was an attempt to get me out of the seat. Instead of being mad at the "bank robber" who ignored all rules of intellectual property rights, the members of the GGOS Executive Committee, with whom I had been working over years to built GGOS, all started to point and yell at me and helped shaking my seat - and I started to wonder why. Maybe having me in the front row and them sitting behind wasn't what they liked? Or they may have been benefiting from the "tilt space" behind my seat and didn't want to give it up, event though it wasn't theirs?

Well, in the end, I got tired of the constant kicking and shaking from behind. I left the plane called GGOS.

The lesson for life: You have to consider carefully whether to tilt the seat - despite the fact that it is perfectly your right to do so. There might be somebody behind you with some unwritten rules, who benefited too much from using your "tilt space" and who will not be willing to give it up, no matter what the costs are going to be. And if you don't want to spent your time fighting silly fights against those shaking your seat, you might have to leave the plane or at least find a new seat.


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.