Perlentaucher
The pearl is a German online magazine for literature and culture. Pearl diver claims to be with more than 600,000 visitors a month (as of 2008) " probably the biggest cultural magazine in the German network ". Core elements are a feature Rundschau, in which the feature pages of major German daily and weekly newspapers ( Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Tagesspiegel, the daily newspaper, Die Welt and Die Zeit) are evaluated and summarized, an international Rundschau magazine and a book database with around 37,000 entries (as at end 2011) in which are found since 2000 resumes to virtually all published in these papers book reviews.
History
The idea for the pearl had in 1999, Anja Seeliger and Thierry Chervel, which then together with Adam Cwientzek and Niclas Seeliger founded the pearl Medien GmbH. Since 15 March 2000, the pearl is online.
The feuilleton Rundschau titled "Today in the arts pages " is taken daily by Spiegel Online. Pearl sells banner ads on the website and in the sent e -mail newsletters and offers a service for creating sites.
The website has been awarded the 2003 " Grimme Online Award media journalism". The jury described Perlentaucher.de as a unique [s ] "Journal of the journals ". In a survey of German literature bloggers pearl is rated in many categories as the best literature portal, such as in the breadth of information.
In 2005, the pearl founded with the support of the German Federal Cultural Foundation an English-language sister site: signandsight.com aimed at an international audience and wanted its own feature show, translations of selected articles and topics focus on an insight into the contemporary cultural life and social debate in Germany give. After the promotion had expired by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the portal was still several years supported by an annual 30,000 Euro annually by Jakob Augstein and Rudolf Augstein Foundation. On 28 March 2012, the editors announced the hiring of signandsight.com for economic reasons.
Pearl jointly managed with the magazine Courrier International (Le Monde) from 2005 to April 2008, the press review of the side euro | topics, a web offering the Federal Agency for Civic Education ( bpb). After June 2007, the then freelancers for euro | topics Olaf Sunderineyer had published in the newspaper an article against the work of pearl, bpb president Thomas Kruger left the project in October 2007, new tender. The tender won the Network for Reporting on Eastern Europe eV ( n-ost ), a company specializing in Eastern European network of some 200 international journalists and media, which also Sunderineyer belongs. Advisory Board Member by n-ost is co-editor of the FAZ Werner d' Inca. This assured to have only " casually in my role as an advisory body " experience of the candidate and have only then contacted Sunderineyer. Pearl thus lost its largest contract to date in the amount of 560,000 euros.
In January 2011, requested " the pearl " ( so the signature) their readers to make a financial contribution to ensure the continued existence of the platform. The appeal was based on the decline in the prices of banner advertising on the Internet. We ask for a voluntary support by the readers because of the pearl should continue to be preserved as open access service on the Internet. The call provided within two weeks donations in the amount of 22,000 euros. Readers were told that this kind of support is still possible because the donor funding contributes to the independence of the portal.
Litigation
The pearl and two large German newspaper publishers contributed between 2006 and 2011 from a court dispute through all instances of possible copyright infringement. By the resale of summaries from the feuilleton of the online bookseller amazon.de and buecher.de FAZ and SZ saw violated their copyrights. Your actions for injunction and damages were dismissed on 23 November 2006, in the second instance by the District Court Frankfurt am Main on 11 December 2007. The abstracts of book reviews are as free uses of the original reviews admissible (§ 24 German Copyright Act). Nor infringes their trademark rights against commercial use of the plaintiff or of the law against unfair competition. In contrast, FAZ and SZ designed a revision. On 1 December 2010 the Federal Court of Appeal overturned the judgment and remitted the matters back to the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main. Although he confirmed the opinion of the court that the plaintiffs could not ask for a general ban on the use of their book reviews alone would depend rather the copyright admissibility of a recovery of the abstracts, if they are independent works in the summaries that in the free use of the original reviews have been created and, therefore, shall be used in accordance with § 24 Section 1 of the German Copyright Act without the consent of the originator of the use of art. The Court of Appeal did in its determination of whether the facts alleged by the plaintiffs summaries to comply with this requirement, but not applied the correct legal standards and also not taken into account all the relevant actual circumstances.
On November 1, 2011, the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main decided that indeed certain pearl - reviews, which were published in December 2004 and were named specifically by the plaintiffs, their copyright injured. These abstracts existed more or less of an acquisition of particularly formative and expressive passages of the original reviews, some of which sentences have been omitted only. They therefore established an impermissible constitute " non-free " processing within the meaning of the copyright law and should not have been taken without the consent of the applicants. In this - limited - scope of the Court of Appeal gave the vocations instead therefore and changed the earlier judgments of the district court accordingly.