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Microsoft Threatened with New Fines by the European Commission: What American Law Should NOT Learn from European Law

We just posted at LawPundit about:

1) the fact that the European Commission some time ago fined Microsof for alleged anti-trust activities and that it had threatened to continue to fine Microsoft several million dollars a day until it opened up its proprietary software to European companies; and

2) the fact that the German government recently expressed great misgivings about the non-transparent non-democratic anonymous legislative and ruling role that the European Commission plays in the current government of Europe.

We now read today in Business Week in an article by Raf Casert out of Brussels, Belgium that Europe threatens new Microsoft fines through the European Commission.

One legal institution that no one in America ever wants to emulate is the European Commission, sadly designed on the basis of greatly inadequate French governmental models, which is an anonymous collection of serendipity bureaucrats that has taken to governing the European Union in a style reminiscent of the old oligarchies of Russia under the motto : we decide, you obey. Democracy is not a word that the European Commission understands and we predict that its non-democratic nature will be its downfall down the road, as we expect the European Parliament to ultimately take over many jobs that the European Commission does today.

As Casert writes, the rule of law does not appear to be a strength at the EU Commission:

"Ronald Cass, chairman of the Washington-based Center for the Rule of Law, said the EU "has taken another step toward turning successful businesses into regulated utilities."

"The Commission's new effort, if pursued, will undermine innovation and take Europe further away from the sort of predictable, stable, sensible legal rules that define the rule of law," Cass said." [link added by LawPundit]

And further....

"Microsoft is challenging the EU's 2004 antitrust ruling -- which resulted in the order to share code and information with rivals at reasonable prices -- at the EU's Court of First Instance. A decision is expected sometime this summer." [link added by LawPundit]

Whatever the decision of that Court, the problem of the European Commission remains, not only for foreign governments and corporations dealing with the European Union, but also for the Europeans themselves, who have created a monster that no one wants, and no one really knows what to do about, yet.

Crossposted to LawPundit.

US Supreme Court Vacates Absurd Punitive Damages Award in Oregon Tobacco Case : What American Law Should Learn from European Law

Perhaps Phillip Morris USA v. Williams, No. 05-1256 (U.S. Feb. 20, 2007) is the turning point. After changes in style, perhaps we have changes in substance.

Perhaps Phillip Morris USA v. Williams is the case that marks the hoped-for change from the hopelessly antiquated SCOTUS envisioned by such outdated theoreticians as Marjorie Cohn.

FINALLY, at long last, the United States Supreme Court for the first time in decades is saying that "enough is enough" of the absurd money judgments which pervade the American legal system and which have made American jurisprudence the laughing-stock of the legal world.

As written by Professor Stephen B. Presser at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research:

"As the twenty-first century unfolds and commerce becomes more and more globalized, there is a need to harmonize the law of products liability across nations. So far, unfortunately, efforts at harmonization have too often been in the direction of reproducing the costly features of United States tort doctrines — doctrines that have imposed spiraling costs on American manufacturers. [emphasis added]

Even though the European Community recently altered its tort doctrines from a pure fault-based system to strict products liability, there are features of the European legal system that lessen the effects of even strict liability. Consequently, European courts are much less likely to hand out unpredictable and disproportionate damage judgments—unlike American courts, where ruinous verdicts are a potential in too many lawsuits. [emphasis added]

Europe has escaped an American style litigation explosion by erecting barriers to excessive litigation. Such barriers include:

* Absence of contingent fees
* Loser pays winner’s attorney fees
* Discouragement of massive discovery filings
* Lower damage judgments
* Absence of punitive damages
* Non-use of juries in civil cases
* Lower expectations of damages [emphasis added]

Unless similar barriers to excessive litigation are created in the U.S., American companies face an ongoing competitive disadvantage relative to European manufacturers who operate in a more predictable, less costly, and less litigious legal environment. In one case, probably typical, Dow Chemical Corporation estimates that it spends 100 times as much on litigation costs in the U.S. as opposed to Europe.

America prides itself on being the world’s pre-eminent economic superpower, but if American economic preeminence is to survive in a highly competitive global marketplace, there must be changes in the American legal system. We should seek to reproduce here some of the features of the European system of litigation. It is time, in short, to give American firms the same legal protections that European firms enjoy, rather than waiting for Europeans to harmonize their legal systems with their aberrant American cousins." [emphasis added]

As political centrists, we have been waiting for over a year now for a sign from the United States Supreme Court under new Chief Justice John Roberts and new Justice Samuel Alito that things are going to turn for the better in America's highest court.

Phillip Morris USA v. Williams gives us that hope. Absurd punitive damages judgments will be fewer as a result of this absolutely correct decision by the new Roberts-led United States Supreme Court.

It is a court burdened by the legacy of an ineffectual and inconsistent Rehnquist Court, whose main mark is "unfinished business" in a legal system left in turmoil, lagging far behind modern technological developments and unprepared judicially for the digital age. As noted by Joan Biskupic in USA Today:

"Rehnquist helped transform a bench preoccupied with the rights of the poor and disenfranchised into one that usually prefers to leave society's problems to elected legislators."

That conservative, hands-off Rehnquist strategy backfired for over three decades as the legislative qualifications of members of the United States Congress constantly dropped, with the percentage of law-trained representatives becoming ever smaller and necessary legislation becoming rarer and rarer. Additionally, the technological competence that is required in the modern age is simply not present in Congress, either in the legislators or in their staff:

"The United States Congress is increasingly called upon to legislate on a host of technologically complex matters. Unfortunately, relatively few of the 535 Senators and Representatives holding seats in Congress have technical backgrounds or have staff with technical qualifications."

We hold out little hope for the US Congress to improve on this score, since the populist popular election of Congressmen and Congresswomen by a largely uninformed and ignorant public - conditioned to stupidity by soap box television and news media geared to the lowest common denominator - will over the years inevitably lead to increasingly less competent people filling Congressional seats. (The decline of empires in this regard is thus quasi pre-programmed.)

Can the United States Supreme Court pick up the slack in the coming years?

What did the court decide in Williams? The US Supreme Court vacated the egregious punitive damages award in the Oregon tobacco case of Phillip Morris USA v. Williams, as Justice Breyer (age 68), who delivered the opinion of the Court, and Chief Justice Roberts (age 52) and Justices Kennedy (age 70), Souter (age 67) and Alito (age 56), joined in the 5-4 opinion. See here e.g. Robert Barnes at the Washington Post for details.

Justices Stevens (age 86), Ginsburg (age 74), Scalia (age 70) and Thomas dissented, none of these latter Justices apparently understanding the difference between civil and criminal law, and we can only hope that some of those Justices soon go into retirement. Justice John Paul Stevens will be 87 in April and he long ago should have retired. Justice Ginsburg turned 74 in March and Scalia is 70, but two centuries back in his constitutional originalist opinions. Except for Thomas, who often votes octogenerically with Scalia for reasons quagmired in past centuries, the opinions in this case again run pretty much along the lines of age, with the youngest Justices voting for the majority and the oldest Justices dissenting. We pointed to this age factor previously here at LawPundit as something which should be corrected in the future so that Justices and Judges face manadatory retirement age at 70. Period. No exceptions. They should go fishing and enjoy their retirement years rather than making critical decisions in a time which has passed them by.

For those of our readers who do not understand our tirades against the courts and the legislatures, we refer to a book by Professor Larry Kramer, a constitutional scholar who recently became the Dean of the Stanford Law School.

That book,
The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review,New York, Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN: 0-19-516918-2,
is reviewed in Law and Politics Book Review, Vol. 14 No.11 (November 2004), pp.916-926,
by John Michael Eden, Duke University School of Law, john.eden@law.duke.edu, and
by John Paul Ryan, The Education, Public Policy, and Marketing Group, Inc. johnpryan@ameritech.net, where they write:

"It is in light of these baleful features of judicial supremacy that PEOPLE advocates an approach to judicial review that restricts the authority of the Supreme Court. This approach Kramer calls “departmental” or “coordinate” construction. The main virtue of coordinate construction is that the authoritativeness of any particular decision depends “on reactions from the other branches and, through them, from the public” (p.252). While it is unclear precisely how individual citizens are supposed to make their preferences known so that the “other branches” can check particular decisions rendered by the Court, PEOPLE suggests that citizens in the early republic, meaning the period from about 1760 to 1840, “had both a right and a responsibility to act when the ordinary legal process failed,” provided that those very citizens continue to “profess loyalty to the government” and follow the ordinary laws the legitimacy of which was not currently in dispute (p.25)."

We agree with Kramer on the fact that the authority of the Supreme Court (or any court for that matter) is constrained by their impression on us (and you, and everyone else) and our commentary at LawPundit proceeds in that spirit. When the courts commit great blunders and when things are not in order, we call them on it. And that is one element of what Kramer is talking about. WE are the governed, but to be governed in a democracy, we have to give our consent, and for our consent to exist, the RESULTS in the three government branches have to have some semblance of common sense and sanity. Otherewise, you have revolution - and that in part is what we are facing, for example, in the intellectual property law sector, where the institutions of government have been falling on their noses in regulating that area of law, so that a "free" law-free zone of sorts has developed which the law is going to have a difficult time in getting in its grasp again. Caveat emptor.

Crossposted to LawPundit.

MP3 Shows that America is being Trounced by Europe on the Corporate Battlefield

The MP3 Codec and its Licensing

MP3 is a codec, a standard for compression and decompression of music, developed in Germany by the Fraunhofer Institute.

The word CODEC is formed by the first letters of the words COmpression and DEComprression. MP3 is the short form for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. Wilson Yuen writes:

"MP3 is currently the most powerful algorithm in a series of audio encoding standards developed under the sponsorship of the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and formalized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)."

The right to license the MP3 codec is owned by the French company Thomson (mp3licensing).

The MP3 Codec is a Standard for Compressing and Decompressing Music Files

MP3 is similar to the much older JPEG standard for graphics, which makes files smaller by removing color information while attempting to retain as much of the original picture intact as possible. MP3 is a two-pass compression system, utilizing Huffman encoding in the second pass, and in the first pass primarily removing music information to make music files smaller than e.g. the original CD versions. The fact that MP3 files are up to 12 times smaller than the original uncompressed files - with minimal loss of music quality - has made the MP3 codec very popular.

MP3 and Similar Standards should not be Subject to Patentability

MP3 is in our opinion one prime example of the kind of "alleged" invention that should never have been granted a patent in the first place (see the MP3 patent discussion here), nor should the alleged technology behind such an invention in any manner be eligible for patent protection. MP3 is a standard - there could easily be others. It is nothing more than a particular method of compressing and decompressing information, applying generally known principles and methods.

The Methods of Compression and Decompression are Limited and Known

There are only a limited number of basic ways in which information can be compressed and decompressed - principally by reducing the information indexed and by better notation of repetition and redundancies. Why should a codec like that be subject to patenting?

Take this sentence as an example of a unit to be compressed:
MP3 is a compression and decompression codec to compress and decompress music files.
We can compress that sentence by just leaving out "compression and decompression", resulting in MP3 is a codec to compress and decompress files, without thus losing much meaning and we can reduce it further by better notation of the word "compress" which still appears twice in the remaining sentence, so that we could then write MP3 is a codec to c. and dec. files. Upon decompression, "c." would again be replaced by the word "compress".

To call a codec an invention stretches the definition of "invention" past logical limits because doing so prohibits others from utilizing similar AND obvious compression methods - which are limited in number by mathematics.

All digital information consists of 1's and 0's, so that any method that can more compactly describe those 1's and 0's is potentially useful for a codec. For example, if we have a picture of 10 lines, each 100 pixels long, and that picture is white for the first 9 lines but contains a black straight line the entire length of the 10th line, then we do not need to make a separate notation for each of these 1000 pixels. Rather, we can treat the first 900 pixels as ALL white (all zeroes) and the last 100 pixels as ALL black (all ones), so that our notation can be short "900 0's in 10 lines and 100 1's in 1 line". If we set our default value to "0" then "100 1's in line 10" is notation enough. The picture is thus compressed. The principle in music is the same. But this recognition is not "an invention".

Although the actual application of any given compression and decompression standard such as JPEG or MP3 is of course more complicated when dealing with large masses of photo or music information, that is fundamentally all there is to it. There is nothing magical about it that needs the protection of patents. MP3 removes musical information that is hard for humans to hear but which microphones pick up. When such information is removed, music files are much smaller.

General Principles of Shorthand were known prior to Christ

General principles of information compression and notation were known long before JPEGs or MP3s came into existence. Shorthand has long been used in writing in law by court reporters (NCRA) and Greek and Roman tachygraphy was known already before the days of Christ. Hebrew language was generally written without vowels, presumably as a form of shorthand. Compression is simply a form of shorthand.

The Machine Rendition of Voice and Music began with Bell and Edison

Limitations of writing systems for recording purposes led man to develop machines for reproducing the human voice and music, which culminated in Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone and Thomas Alva Edison's invention of the phonograph. The patents awarded to Bell and Edison created empires which still thrive today.

AT&T's Patent-Based Monopoly remains Intact

One of the things that the political, corporate and legal establishment in the United States does not appear to appreciate is that patent monopolies, once granted, far outlive the actual duration of patents, and give the holders of those patents - on a silver platter - industrial empires which last centuries. The best example of that in Europe is the post monopoly of Thurn & Taxis, whose family, hundreds of years later, is still one of the wealthiest families in Europe.

Alexander Graham Bell's patents were challenged something like 600 times during his lifetime, but his patent-based monopoly could not be shaken and AT&T (later known as "Ma Bell") went on to control nearly the entire US telephone market, creating one of the most powerful monopolies of the modern business age.

The legal community in the United States appears to be overwhelmed by Ma Bell. The "trustbusters", not understanding that patents were at the root of Ma Bell's power, decided to break up America's biggest and most powerful corporation in 1974. The result has been the creation of a multi-headed hydra of "Baby Bells" which resulted from the break-up of AT&T who now threaten to join together into one great corporation with even greater powers than before. Ma Bell is still quite alive and kicking - patent monopolies, once granted, have a long life.

"Ma Bell Still Has You by the Bells"

One used to say that "Ma Bell Has You by the Calls" (non-native speakers who do not understand that joke should be aware of the American idiom "have someone by the balls").

Part of the Ma Bell legacy is found in the now spun-off Lucent Bell Labs of what is the French company, Alcatel-Lucent (Bell Labs was formerly AT&T Bell Laboratories viz. Bell Telephone Laboratories):

"At its peak, Bell Labs was the premier facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, and the C programming language. There have been 6 Nobel Prizes awarded for work done at Bell Labs."

This 6-Nobel-Prize-producing former American laboratory is now owned by the French.

The Alcatel-Lucent Patents in the Patent Suit Against Microsoft

An American jury has just awarded the French company Alcatel-Lucent $1.5 billion for the patents below, to be paid by Microsoft (but of course, the bill is actually paid ultimately by the American consumer), and Alcatel-Lucent have numerous patent suits more in the pipeline against Microsoft.

Will French ultimately own Microsoft?

US Patent 5,341,457 - Abstract
Perceptual coding of audio signals
"A technique for the masking of quantizing noise in the coding of audio signals is adapted to include geometric interpolation between the thresholds for a tone masking noise and for noise masking a tone, in order to reduce use of bit-rate capability where it is not necessary for transparent or high quality. The technique is usable with the types of channel coding known as "noiseless" or Huffman coding and with variable radix packing. The stereophonic embodiment eliminates redundancies in the sum and difference signals, so that the stereo coding uses significantly less than twice the bit rate of the comparable monaural signal. The technique can be used both in transmission of signals and in recording for reproduction, particularly recording and reproduction of music. Compatibility with the ISDN transmission rates known as 1 B, 2 B and 3 B rates has been achieved."

One of the inventors of the above patent, James David Johnston, retired from AT&T and became an audio architect for Microsoft Corporation. See Perceptual Coding of Audio Signals - A Tutorial. Is that the root of the problem? Johnston is also the inventor of the following patent.

US Patent RE39080
Rate loop processor for perceptual encoder/decoder
This is a reissue application of U.S. Pat. No. 5,627,938 filed Sep. 22, 1994 as application Ser. No. 08/310,898 which is a continuation of application Ser. No. 07/844,811, filed on Mar. 2, 1992, now abandoned, which is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 07/844,967 filed Feb. 28, 1992, now abandoned, which is a continuation of Ser. No. 07/292,598 filed Dec. 30, 1988 now abandoned.

"A method and apparatus for quantizing audio signals is disclosed which advantageously produces a quantized audio signal which can be encoded within an acceptable range. Advantageously, the quantizer uses a scale factor which is interpolated between a threshold based on the calculated threshold of hearing at a given frequency and the absolute threshold of hearing at the same frequency."

Those are the two patents for which a jury just awarded Alcatel-Lucent $1.5 billion. Not bad considering that Alcatel paid only about $11.5 billion for the entire company Lucent - and that was merely a stock deal, no cash at all. If Alcatel gets similar judgments on its other patent suits, its purchase will have been a STEAL, and we do emphasize the world steal. Lots of money flowing out of America into Parisian coffers.

At the same time, Alcatel-Lucent plans to cut 12500 jobs worldwide (12% in France) - which means more unemployed on the streets and more money for execs such as Patricia J. Russo, whose entire career is littered with thousands of people losing their jobs under her leadership.

European Commission Fines Microsoft

The European Commission found Microsoft to have engaged in anti-trust activities in Europe and fined it $357 million, threatening to continue to fine it several million dollars a day until it opens up its proprietary software to European companies. The European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes, who imposed the fines, was at the time on the board of directors of
.... Lucent.

France and Germany Seek to Force Apple to Open its iPod DRM

And how about Apple, which is being forced by France and Germany to open its iPod DRM?
Will Apple be another French company soon?

The European Strategy Against Corporate America

On the one hand, European companies are using the Alice in Wonderland US patent laws to relieve American corporations of billions of dollars of cash. On the other hand, European companies and the European Union are forcing American corporations to open their proprietary software to their European competitors and to dismantle their product protection in Europe for the benefit of European products.

Can it really be that corporate America does not understand what is going on?

Crossposted to LawPundit.

German Vice-Chancellor Muntefering Challenges Lawmaking and Presidential Selection Procedures in the European Union

The European Union has a very dubious system of lawmaking, whereby laws are drafted and proposed by the EU's super-bureaucratic 25000-employee European Commission, rather than by the elected European Parliament.

This has led to a terrible situation whereby the European Union has come to be governed day-to-day by this anonymous body, which is not only not democratically elected but which is following its own specific agenda without any meaningful contact to the wishes of the citizens of the EU Member States.

As reported by Mark Beunderman in the EU Observer, this situation has rightly become a thorn in the eye of Germany, which is one of the main funders of the EU without at the same time having much say about what the EU does. Germany's Vice-Chancellor Franz Muntefering is quoted as saying that:

"We should be asking ourselves the question who decides what is on the agenda in Europe. Only the [European] Commission? Something should change in this respect. More possibilities for political initiatives by the European Parliament would be good," Mr Muntefering, the second-highest member of the German government, told Sueddeutsche Zeitung over the weekend."

Muntefering also criticized the anonymous manner in which the European Commission president is chosen:

"[W]e should think further whether the current system can remain so anonymous and indirect. "

Muntefering is a practical man and not one given to simple speculation in the newspapers. Accordingly, we take his statements to be indicative of serious changes in the offing for the way that the European Union is governed. These changes may not take place immediately, but we are sure they are forthcoming to counteract a non-democratic EU Commission which has become more and more disliked as time goes on.

Sweden Ancient Astronomy and the Gerum Cloak

Bring on Sherlock Holmes . . .
and at least one lawyer, trained in evidence . . . pro bono publico.

THE GERUM CLOAK MYSTERY

The more than 2000-year old Cloak of Gerum (photos and info below) provides us - as we will show - with the greatest "real" (non-fiction) cloak and dagger mystery of all time, unsolved up to now, but - as we allege - for the most part solved (but not entirely) in this posting.

The technology that we use to solve this mystery is demonstrated in the following graphic - which contains a secret message - to which we give the simple and ultimately helpful clue:
42 (read further below to understand its significance in the context of this posting). Any change to this graphic by, e.g. compression, destroys the secret message:


The mainstream archaeologists recently determined,

via the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities
and the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science
(which "performs laboratory analyses of samples collected from various scenes of suspected crimes" and uses the most modern investigatory criminal forensic techniques available to man - the Scandinavians are indeed top in many scientific and engineering fields)

(stated in our free translation from the Swedish using the assistance of Systran)
that:

"[T]he Gerum Cloak has five cuts made by knife or dagger and that these stabs [if the cloak had been worn at the time] would have struck the body in the chest, abdomen, spine and neck."

This is cloak and dagger at its best. You have an - alleged - ancient cloak and you also have - alleged - multiple dagger incisions, but - thus far - you have no dagger, and no corpse.

Worse, when the Gerum Cloak was subjected to follow-up tests for blood and DNA, none were found. No human remnants. None.

How is this to be explained?

ORIGIN OF THE GERUM CLOAK

The Gerum Cloak, neatly folded and almost perfectly preserved - a great rarity for archaeology - was found in the year 1920¹ by peat bog diggers in Gerumsberget, Sweden, along with three small stones (found sitting on top of the cloak) which from the photos appear to be about the same size as a super-oversized computer mouse, interpreted - questionably - by the mainstream archaeologists as weights to weigh down the cloak in the bog.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE GERUM CLOAK

[Please note: All photographs below are copyrighted by their owners. We use them here in reliance on the fair use copyright exception for non-profit research. See the original linked articles for more details about each photograph. For the analysis below, one of the photos used MUST be the original, and we do use it.]


Photograph left above by ATA - Photograph right above (3 small stones) by Falbygdens museum in Falköping, which is also a very important Swedish megalithic site

Photo left above by ATA of cloak 1920 - Photo middle (virtual cloak and stones) & photo right (cloak hung) by Falbygdens museum
Gerum Cloak Overhead View
(Original Photo Essential for Forensics)


ABOVE: Overhead photograph of the Gerum Cloak by Gabriel Hildebrandt / SHM
(The discussion below shows that it is important to use the original photograph for analysis)

Gerum Cloak "On the Table View"

ABOVE: Photograph of the Gerum Cloak investigation, photograph by Christer Åhlin / SHM

The white points on the cloak here played a role in our solution of the mystery.

PHOTOGRAPHS ARE THE KEYS TO SOLVE THE GERUM CLOAK MYSTERY

The lower two photographs above were the key photographs for the solution of this mystery:
1) the table photograph because we wondered what the white points were; and, 2) the overhead photograph because we looked for those white points, wondering where they had vanished.

HOW OLD IS THE GERUM CLOAK? IS IT REALLY A CLOAK SHAPE?

Modern chronological dating shows the Gerum Cloak to originate around several hundred years before the birth of Christ (ca. 360-100 BC). The cloak is thus at least 2000 years old and is the oldest intact piece of "clothing" (or what is alleged to be clothing) ever found in Sweden.

Given its oval nearly elliptical shape, the identification as a cloak (rather than, for example, as a tablecloth or wall tapestry) is however certainly susceptible to doubt. We have many cloaks but we have never seen one with an oval shape and with no cut or incision for the head. The peat bog finders, not knowing what else to do with their finding, threw it over their shoulders as if it were a cloak and it has been regarded as a cloak ever since, but it is most likely NOT a cloak. Indeed, if not a cloak, then the dagger marks of the archaeologists are not stab marks at all, which seems likely given their overly wide distribution on the cloak, mostly near the edges.

The shape of the cloak, as we shall see, as well as the dagger slashes on the cloak, are, however, important clues to the resolution of the real secret of the cloak.

WHAT ABOUT THE THREE STONES?

If someone had committed a murder and was trying to hide a bloodied cloak, they would not use three such unusually-shaped and differently weighted stones this small to sink the cloak in a bog, nor would they first fold the cloak neatly. The fact that the cloak was still neatly folded when found indicates additionally that the stones had no effect on sinking the cloak, which, if effective, would have destroyed the folding. Rather, it appears that the cloak and stones were intentionally and neatly hidden together - but possibly too near an inviting bog, probably by someone who thought that he or someone else might recover them soon. Perhaps they were hidden in the bog by someone thinking they could not be found there, would not sink too deeply and could be retrieved shortly. But no one came to retrieve them and so they sank slowly (retaining the folding) into the bog which preserved them for over 2000 years.

The bottom stone looks almost like an iron for ironing clothes or fabric, i.e. something to slide along a surface, and in my opinion the upper two smaller stones appear to be made to fit exactly on top of the larger stone. Each of these smaller stones has what appears to be a sculpted straight edge, suggesting a maneuverable usage intended for marking something, much like modern markers for lines or locations on a map, perhaps a kind of angle-setter? We leave this issue to the engineers out there in cyberspace.

WHAT IS THE REAL SECRET OF THE GERUM CLOAK?

Does the Gerum Cloak hide a different real secret, and if so, what is it?

We have discovered that all that is required to reveal the hidden secret of the Gerum Cloak are the right tools and the right detective work in using them.

With apologies to other forensic experts, but in the case of the Gerum Cloak, every internet user potentially possesses tools necessary for decipherment success in the instant case.

FORENSIC SCIENCE, STEP BACK : WE ONLY NEED ONE PHOTO PLUS PSP

All that one needs to decipher the Gerum Cloak are:

1) an otherwise unformatted original overhead photograph copy of the Gerum Cloak laid down flat, such as the original photograph of Gabriel Hildebrandt (who we do not know personally) reproduced above, and;

2) a graphics program such as Paint Shop Pro ("PSP", by Corel, formerly JASC) having a "threshold level" menu option for showing the most minimal color differences in any image. We use the German version of PSP 7.00, where the threshold value menu option is found under the colors menu as the option "Schwellenwert": [Farben/Farbeinstellungen/Schwellenwert]. Note that this menu is activated only after an image is loaded into PSP.

MENU OPTION FOR THRESHOLD VALUE PERMITS PRO SLEUTHING

The ability to depict very precisely the minutial differences in color of adjacent pixels on a photograph allows the identification of marks or etchings on surfaces which are as good as invisible to the human eye or which can otherwise only be found with great difficulty - or not at all - by more modern technologies. To our knowledge, we were the first ever to use precisely this graphics technology in archaeology, already applying it to the study of figures found on photographs of megaliths, megalithic sites and petroglyphs (see Stars Stones and Scholars).

GABRIEL HILDEBRANDT'S OVERHEAD PHOTOGRAPH OF THE GERUM CLOAK AND THE COLOR THRESHOLD METHOD OF FINDING HIDDEN FIGURES

Using Gabriel Hildebrandt's original photograph above and available at Gabriel Hildebrandt / SHM, anyone having the graphics program Paint Shop Pro (it may also work with other graphics programs having a comparable menu option) can duplicate our results by using the threshold settings that we provide below. The three rows below show the color blue (#0000ff) progressively differentiated by 1) brightness, 2) saturation and 3) hue.


Each of the 46 colors above (48 boxes but 3 are identical) is a different RGB blue color. The differences in blue in each color row above are very hard to discern with the human eye, though the eyes do "see" these colors, as shown by our comparison of the leftmost and rightmost elements of each row (you need true color on your monitor to see all of these colors).

However, such subtle color changes, when close to each other, are turned by the brain into flowing color schemes by a process called optical mixing. This facility of our brain was exploited in Neo-Impressionism, a school of art founded by Georges Seurat, whose computer-futuristic and greatly underestimated Pointillism (try it out here) consisted of painting by small dots too small to be seen individually, which gave his paintings a tremendous brilliance because of the miniscule white space surrounding those dots. Pointillism clearly anticipated pixel technology on television screens and computer monitors.

In a similar way, the PSP threshold value menu option permits us to isolate real but otherwise imperceptible color differences between pixels and to discover actual figures present in an image which we otherwise would not recognize as such.

In PSP the color threshold settings can be given a minimum value of 1 and a maximum of 255.

Below you see Hildebrandt's original photo viewed using the Paint Shop Pro color threshold settings of 81 in the first case, and 85, 86 and 87 in the second case. We presume these settings work identically on all computers running the same program. Run the threshold values on the original photograph first and not on a resized version of it, which gives less accurate results:

The Hildebrandt photograph shown at PSP threshold level 81
Look at the middle of the above 81-PSP-thresholded image. What do you see?
Lots of dots, right?
Do you see anything familiar in those dots?

The Hildebrandt photograph shown at threshold levels 85, 86 and 87
--We call your attention again to the center of those three Gerum Cloak images, using PSP threshold settings of 85, 86 and 87, and we ask you, what do you see? If you see nothing recognizable, we suggest you call in your resident astronomer for advice and assistance.

DECIPHERMENT OF THE GERUM CLOAK

Do not read further here
if you do not want us to tell you what you see
and/or if you want to decipher the Gerum Cloak on your own. Otherwise, read on.

What those images clearly show in the middle of the Gerum Cloak - thresholded at 81 by PSP - are the stars of Ursa Major (the Big Dipper, the Great Bear, the Wain), Virgo, Boötes, Hercules and Lyra - and they show those stars pretty exactly. Recall that we are seeing here just a tiny photographic image of a large piece of fabric. More sophisticated photo equipment taking OPTICAL close-ups of sections of the Gerum Cloak will give even better results.

Below are two digitally-made close-ups of the Gerum Cloak photo. In the first we compare the Gerum Cloak with the stars of Ursa Major, Virgo, Boötes, Hercules and Lyra as shown by Starry Night Pro. We have a clear match of stars.


In the second close-up we view the images representing the threshold values of 85, 86 and 87 as compared to the stars produced by Starry Night Pro. Opposite of Ursa Major we clearly find the stars of Draco marked on the Gerum Cloak (this is at the North Ecliptic Pole):


Some of the star groups in the course of life of the Gerum Cloak appear to have been painted over with an appropriate figure, for example, Cygnus, which is shown as a bird (head at the top middle) at threshold level 74, although the stars iota and kappa Cygnii are clearly identifiable:


Also important are the images which result for the stars Orion and Scorpio - which are across from each other in the heavens and build a traditional historic ancient celestial meridian. At the identical PSP threshold value of 54 for both of these groups of stars, a threshold identity which suggests that these stellar groups were both marked on the Gerum Cloak in the same manner at nearly the same time, the main stars of Orion and Scorpio can clearly be identified (see the close-ups in the final decipherment image below.

Knowing now the position of the above stellar groupings on the Gerum Cloak, we can possibly identify the knife or dagger marks on that cloak, as intentional dagger slashes acting as permanent edges for major astronomical lines of orientation, specifically the Equinoxes and Solstices and the 24° degree axis tilt of the Earth relative to ancient cardinal points at Orion and Scorpio. Perhaps the cloak was hung on an ancient wooden wall using sharp objects at the focal areas. Seasonally seen - the tilt of the Earth's axis is "equalized" at both the Autumn and Spring Equinoxes, when the days and nights are equally long everywhere, and when the ecliptic (angled 24° to the celestial equator) crosses the celestial equator at the two crossing nodes.


THE FINAL DECIPHERMENT GRAPHIC FOR THE GERUM CLOAK

Armed with the above knowledge, knowing that an oval viz. elliptical shape is the shape of the heavens, it is easy to see, using the threshold value of 81 as the basis for the graphic below, that the Gerum Cloak is a sky map of the heavens of the northern hemisphere. It is an ancient planisphere.



We have added the positions of the North Ecliptic Pole and the North Celestial Pole to our decipherment graphic for purposes of understanding, but these circles are not marked on the Gerum Cloak directly as far as we can tell, although the fact that the heaven's pole positions are centered in the middle of the cloak would seem clearly to demonstrate a knowledge of those positions on the part of the cloak's makers, as we have seen for Scandinavia in the rock drawings.

If the Gerum Cloak is a cloak at all, then it is similar in function to the heavenly cape found in e.g. Verse 33854 of the Latvian Dainas,² where the Moon is seen to ride his steed in the sky with a cape of stars on his back. It was surely an important motif in ancient astronomy. Indeed, Johann Bayer, a German lawyer and amateur astronomer, published his famous star atlas Uranometria in the year 1603 with Diana pictured on the front cover of the book as the Moon goddess wearing a cape of stars. When we view some smaller modern fabrics, such as "banners", for example, the flags of the United States of America or the European Union, then we see that the stars have not lost their importance as symbols of choice.

We hope that the archaeologists in Sweden, perhaps with the help of this posting, may elevate the Gerum Cloak to the noble position in ancient astronomy which it would seem to deserve.

42.
___________________
¹ Post, L.v., Waltersdorff, E.v. & Lindqvist, S., Bronsåldersmanteln från Gerumsberget i Västergötland. (Der bronzezeitliche Mantel von Gerumsberget in Västergötland.) 1924–25. Out of print.
² Latviešu tautas dziesmas, (Chansons populaires lettonnes), in 12 volumes, volumes I — XII, edited by Arveds Švābe, Kārlis Straubergs, Edīte Hauzenberga-Šturma, Copenhagen, Imanta (publishers), 1952-1956, Vol. XI, p. 375. In Latvian, Verse 33854 of the Latvian Dainas reads [with our translation next to it]:

[Daina number 33854]

Mēnesītis nakti brauca, [The Moon rides the heavens,]
Zvaigžņu deķis mugurā; [A blanket of stars on his back;]
Rīta zvaigzne, vakarāja, [The Morning Star, (and) Evening Star]
Tie Mēneša kumeliņi. [Are the steeds of the Moon.]

This electronically searchable text of the Latvian Dainas at the University of Virginia is one of the great book digitization achievements of historical literature in the modern era and we heartily congratulate all of those who made it possible, some of whom are listed here and here.

UPDATE, FEBRUARY 10, 2007

We were of two minds about our initial result for the astronomical lines on the Gerum Cloak, so that we have recalculated the entire thing by placing several layers of thresholded pictures on top of one another to give a composite photograph - which allows a more accurate placing of the lines, and give the somewhat amended results below.

The positions of the stars have not changed, but we do interpret the lines a bit differently. Theoretically, the angle between the vertical celestial meridian running between Scorpio and Orion and the dagger mark on the upper left edge of the cloak (presumably the Autumn Equinox) gives an angular separation by Starry Night Pro of about 30°, which would in fact correspond to around 300 BC, the date to which the Gerum Cloak is dated by the archaeologists.


As for the Spring Equinox (the right lower corner of the Gerum Cloak), this is a troublesome cloak region for interpretation. We previously calculated it as 24°, measured from Orion's bow viz. shield, which gave us a date of ca. 1750 BC, so that we were concerned about that date, as it did not mesh with the archaeology dating of the cloak at ca. 300 BC.

In the recalculation above we now have the alternatives of 15°, measured from Bellatrix, i.e. the right edge of Orion, which would measure to Aldebaran and the Hyades, whereas 30° would measure from Bellatrix to the Pleiades and it is about a 50° angular separation to the Spring Equinox in 300 BC. This corner of the decipherment one can best view as "unclear" and we have marked it so in the revised decipherment above. Perhaps the ancients marked Aldebaran and the Hyades and the Pleiades in that era, but we are sceptical.

What should happen now?

The first thing that must be done - based on the results of our work - is for the Gerum Cloak to be examined in Sweden by the forensics experts there to confirm or deny whether stars of the heavens are marked on that Gerum Cloak, as we allege they are.

The second thing to be done by the forensic experts in Sweden is to mark exactly the contours of the dagger incisions (i.e. the slits in the cloak made by some kind of a sharp object) and then to draw the various possible lines which can be drawn to and from these various slits (both from the back as well as the front of the slits) across the cloak to see what kinds of exact angle measurements one obtains.

Only then would one be in a position to determine exactly where the lines were originally intended to run and then one could measure the resulting angles exactly, thereby permitting a more dependable interpretation.

Even then, we have no assurance that the astronomy depicted on the cloak necessarily coincides with the era in which the cloak was made. The cloak could be a copy of an earlier cloak or some other planispheric object. (We have this problem, for example, with chronologies found on cuneiform tablets - which in part have simply been copied from much earlier predecessors - see our discussion of MUL.APIN ).

We think that our discovery of star representations on the Gerum Cloak can be reproduced and substantiated. We think it is less clear as to how the lines of astronomical orientation on the cloak may ultimately be interpreted.

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Rock Drawings in Scandinavia May Show European Astronomy Origins

It was the ancient ordering of the stars of the heavens, which, according to Bertrand Russell, gave men their first conceptions of natural law.

We have been successful - so we allege - in deciphering the entire complex of Scandinavian rock drawings at the World Heritage Site of Tanum, now in Sweden, and formerly in Norway (until the year 1658 - see the Treaty of Roskilde).

Our decipherment shows that the more than 1500 petroglyphs (rock drawings) at Tanum and its rock art affiliate locations form an enormous ca. 70 square kilometer planisphere (sky map of the heavens).

The graphic presentation of the decipherment is found below:

The Decipherment of the Tanum Petroglyphs by Andis Kaulins 2007

This sky map forms a shape of the stars along the Milky Way which was probably intended by its makers to represent a heavenly boat of the ancient Nordic seafarers. We have drawn in the line of the Milky Way to show this, but it is not, as far as we know, actually drawn on the ground.

As we shall be presenting a paper on this topic in May of this year in Horn / Bad Meinberg, Germany, at the Machalett Conference on Preshistory and Early History, this posting just contains the basics of our discovery.

It was 30 years ago in the year 1977 that this author first visited the petroglyphs (rock drawings) of Tanum, located in Tanumshede, Västra Götaland (historically Bohuslän), about a two-hour drive north of Göteborg (Gothenburg). Tanum was not well known internationally in 1977, in spite of over 1500, in part gigantic, rock drawings.

Tanum includes the following petroglyphic locations covering many square kilometers of countryside: Vitlycke (where the museum is located), Tanum, Tegneby, Aspeberget, Gerum, Ryland, Oppen, Slänge, Varlös, Fossum, Lycke, Hoghem, Västerby, Ljungby, Tuvene, Litsleby, Kyrkoryk, Orrekläpp, Rungstung, Satetorp, Ryk, Tyft, Hovtorp, Björneröd, Bergslycke, Kalleby and Trättelanda.

One key to our decipherment was the Tanum rock drawing location map found at the World Heritage Site for Tanum. Without such a complete overview of the area, such a decipherment as ours would be impossible, since it is the entire complex of petroglyphs which builds the secret to this enormous site. All of these petroglyphs as a whole represent the stars of the heavens, with multiple petroglyphs in clusters representing constellations of stars known to us today. Many of these along the ecliptic of course form our modern Zodiac.

One cannot escape the feeling at Tanum that we are witnessing the birth of modern astronomy among the ancient seafarers, whose need for a knowledge of star orientation in sea navigation is beyond dispute.

These ancient men formed these constellations primarily for practical purposes and not, as mainstream archaeology persists in advocating regarding these petroglyphs, for unproven rites and rituals, which may have been a part of the complex of the ancient world, but certainly not as its moving force.

It is in fact little wonder that there are so many boats (ancient ships) represented in the petroglyphic figures. To the seafaring ancients, the night sky was a sea of stars. We think it possible that this might be the location at which our modern stellar constellations were initially "grouped" by European man - for purposes of navigation in seafaring travel.

There are other proofs - beyond the evidence of the rock drawings themselves - that this astronomical decipherment is correct, e.g. the names of locations at which the rock drawings are found, but these proofs will first be discussed in a paper in German to be presented to the 41st Conference of the Machalett Study Group on Prehistory and Early History in May of this year.