realmike.org

On Friday, Mike Masnick posted this on Techdirt (the story also appeared on Slashdot today):

Bas Grasmayer points us to the claim that the Austrian town of Frauenkirchen has apparently tried to patent the fact that it represents the geographical midpoint of Europe.

Mike filed the story in the category “from the this-is-a-joke,-right? dept”, so I figure he didn’t buy it entirely. But the story goes to show how screwed up the patent system is, so to hell with it—why not post it anyway, right?

I dug deeper and it turns out that the patent thing was added to the German Wikipedia page on January 3, 2006 by an anonymous user. Here’s the full edit, translated to English by me (emphasis is mine):

Frauenkirchen is [...] the future thermal spring destination of the Seewinkel region. [...] the water regulations authority has already given permission to build a thermal bath. The chairman of the tourism board responsible for this, Corino Fabiani, MBA, is already thinking about changing the town’s name to Bad [Bath] Frauenkirchen. According to information from the Austrian Patent Office, the “Mittelpunkt Europas” ["Center of Europe"] has been successfully protected for Frauenkirchen with file reference AM 7738/2003. It is stated that this refers to the geophysical midpoint of Europe and not of the EU.”

Alarm bells ringing already? Not only does this paragraph predict the future of the town, it even tells us what some guy is thinking. And what does this even mean: The “Center of Europe” has been protected for Frauenkirchen?

It seems to me that AM 7738/2003 might actually be a trademark of some sort (which Mike also suspected), so let’s quickly check the Austrian Patent and Trademark Office’s search engine:

File nr. 7738/2003 telling us that Corino Fabiani's company holds a trademark for the words "Mittelpunkt Europas"

(When I’m using their page, I can literally hear the sounds of the steam-powered COBOL-based mainframe as it churns out the results.)

Indeed, this basically tells us that Corino Fabiani’s company registered a trademark for the words “Mittelpunkt Europas” ["Center of Europe"]. As I see it, the chairman of the tourism board had this dream of turning Frauenkirchen into Europe’s center of thermal baths. He went to  register a trademark and maybe—just maybe—it was him who sat down at midnight on January 3, 2006 to let the world know about it through Wikipedia…

So, what do we learn from this? Not much that we didn’t already know, I’m afraid:

• Wikipedia contains a lot of dubious information.
• Twitter is a good place to spread dubious information of all sorts.
• Politicians will happily repeat anything they find on Wikipedia.
• Techdirt isn’t afraid to do the same. But when they do, they add a question mark to the headline to cover their bases.

Update: Fixed a typo; marked “Center of Europe” as a translation of the actual trademark.