Addendum to the Wikileaks shirt sales ban

Our contribution from yesterday has made quite a splash on the net - among others Fefe, net politics, Nerdcore and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported. At the same time over 140 tweets were posted on the topic. Many thanks to all our followers who shared our tweets!

Apparently Bavaria has now also understood that yesterday's action was simply unwise: Mr. Haberfelner from Bavaria (who had already written the second email yesterday) called me today to discuss the matter again. We talked about the whole thing for a while and I tried to explain once again that it is simply not a good idea to thoughtlessly warn one of the biggest Wikileaks fundraisers in Germany. He also acknowledged this, and the overall tenor was as follows: Mr. Haberfelner apologizes for yesterday's email and offers to look again in a month to see if we can acquire a license or work together in some other way. However, he also asked for our understanding that he would have to negotiate in advance with other, larger companies that have greater distribution power than getDigital.

First of all, I am pleased that Bavaria has apologized for its actions. Whether such commercial exploitation of the Wikileaks brand is a good idea is still very questionable in my opinion, but I already explained in yesterday's post that there is a legitimate component to this approach: After all, there were and are quite a few stores that simply sold Wikileaks shirts at the normal price without donating anything or giving anything to Wikileaks. I never thought that was particularly great myself. On the other hand, the whole thing sounds a bit too much like commercial styling, which just doesn't fit in with a highly political cause like this. And well, of course the emails to us yesterday weren't what we would have liked, but never mind, they've apologized for it, so what the hell, I'm not holding a grudge.

For all the criticism of Wikileaks, by the way: as far as I know, there is still no real alternative, the status of Openleaks for example, is at least not clear to me. And even if Julian Assange seems to behave a bit, well, strangely from time to time: He has nevertheless achieved great things. So let's see what happens next with the Wikileaks shirts. We will of course keep you up to date.