Databases of stolen coins

I'm still upset about the 11,000 coins stolen from the Veliko Tarnovo museum. I don't want to accidently buy one of these coins!

I did a web search for information on protecting myself against the purchase of stolen coins.

Collectors can verify they aren't buying reported stolen goods by checking against databases of stolen art. Unfortunately, it seems difficult to use these database.

The most famous theft database is the Art Lost Register.

http://www.artloss.com/

To search Art Loss's 120,000 item database requires registration (free) and $75 *per search*. The search takes one business day, and the searcher gets a certificate to prove the search was tried. (The certificate proves a buyer did "due diligence" if the item ends up in court).

The $75 fee might be a bargain if purchasing a $20,000 painting.

I signed up for an Art Loss Register account and clicked the box to be notified of coin thefts. I'm curious to know how many of the 120,000 stolen works in the database are coins.


There are other stolen art lists. The FBI's Art Theft Program [ http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/arttheft/arttheft.htm ] keeps a database, the National Stolen Art File, which lists stolen artworks with value $2,000 or more. Coins are included in the file, but I don't know how many. Searches can only be done as part of the investigation of a crime. The web site directs visitors to their local FBI field office.

Interpol keeps their own database. This database is part of the UNIDROIT convention! It lists 28,000 items. The most recent 306 are available online. Of the 306, six stolen items are ancient coins and another 13 are Islamic coins. The ancient coins are:

http://www.interpol.int/public/Data/WorkOfArt/Items/Data/1039/1039321.asp
http://www.interpol.int/public/Data/WorkOfArt/Items/Data/1039/1039323.asp
http://www.interpol.int/public/Data/WorkOfArt/Items/Data/1039/1039322.asp
http://www.interpol.int/public/Data/WorkOfArt/Items/Data/1039/1039326.asp
http://www.interpol.int/public/Data/WorkOfArt/Items/Data/1039/1039325.asp
http://www.interpol.int/public/Data/WorkOfArt/Items/Data/1039/1039324.asp

The full database is not viewable online. A CD ROM is available for 80 euros or 480 euros for a year's subscription. The General Secretariat of Interpol must approve the order.

The Veliko Tarnovo theft isn't yet listed on Interpol's web site. The most recent report there is a week older, the successful recovery of Cellini's "Salt Cellar".

11,000 ancient coins stolen from Bulgarian museum

The Veliko Tarnovo museum was robbed Thursday, February 2nd. 11,000 ancient coins were stolen, including 230 gold coins.

The best report comes from standartnews.com:

"The brazen robbery took place on Thursday night,
police sources announced. The thieves acted like
in a crime thriller -- they eliminated three alarm
systems and unlocked two doors before breaking
into the museum safety-vault.

"The most valuable archaeological collections are
kept there. Two safes, size of a wardrobe, were
broken open and robbed. For now, only one thing is
clear -- fortunately the thieves haven't touched
the gold treasures of Hotnitsa and Golemany. 'The
ring of Tsar Kaloyan is not among the stolen items,
too,' director of the museum Hristo Haritonov said.
Experts are counting the ancient gold coins one by
one to find out what's missing. Yesterday, all the
collections dating back from the Middle Ages and the
period of Bulgarian Revival were checked up.
Obviously the thieves were not interested in them.

novinite.com said the coins include 75 Philip and Alexander tetradrachms, 4000 Roman denarii, and 17th century jewelry from Arbanasi. The weight of the stolen jewelry is estimated at 100kg. "Police official commented that the robbery was very well planned and that insiders might have helped the robbers."

Perhaps the coins will show up on eBay or at coin shows? novinite.com quoted museum officials promising a list of the missing artifacts ready on Monday Feb 6th, but if this list was prepared it hasn't been posted on the Internet.

The museum's web site is http://www.jicabg.com/museum/velikotarnovo-e.html.

Anyone know how to configure BlueTooth on Thinkpads running Windows XP?

Anyone know how to configure BlueTooth on Thinkpads running Windows XP?

Fn-F5 brings up a menu that allows 802.11 and Bluetooth to be turned on and off. Turning on Bluetooth installed something.

Attempting to open "My Bluetooth Places", on the Explorer and/or Desktop, does nothing. (No error messages)

Attempting to open "Bluetooth Configuration" on the Control Panel does nothing. (No error messages)

The Windows Device Manager sees "IBM Integrated Bluetooth II" under "Bluetooth Devices".

The System tray has a bluetooth icon. Right-clicking it gives me the choice "Start Using Bluetooth". Selecting that yields an error message:

"You cannot install an older version of Bluetooth Software over a newer version of Bluetooth Software. [-349]". It them presents me with a file picker dialog that is looking for license.dat in My Documents. (I only have one such file, in c:\wxpdrive\repos\BTHWXP10. Selecting it gives another copy of the same message.) The BTHWXP10 directory seems to hold a WIDCOMM Bluetooth driver.

Does this mean the System Tray includes a BLUETOOTH INSTALL PROGRAM?!? What a waste of tray space, putting install programs there! Especially ones that don't work and can't be removed from the tray.

It seems I'm struck. Anyone encounter this problem before? What was the solution?

Archaeological Dig Uncovers Ancient Race Of Skeleton People

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29976

Did Iraqi border police recover museum artifacts yesterday?

Azzamaz reporter Saadoun al-Jaberi is reporting that Iraqi border police have seized 174 items that were looted from the Iraq museum

http://www.azzaman.com/english/index.asp?fname=news%5C2006-01-03%5C144.htm

CPProt is also carrying the same story.

I hope it's true. Unfortunately the article says the recovered pieces include silver bracelets, rings, and chains.

Except for a few large treasures the stolen pieces were: pins, seals, "pottery pieces", pendants, and bronze weapons. Perhaps the pendants were on silver chains? Otherwise I see no correlation between the missing pieces and the smuggled pieces.

Peter Petrisko, lately of Media Petros, brought me to Information Overload at CounterCulture Café last Monday, where I read aloud from Couplehood.

Peter ran Gallery X in the early 1990s. My experiences there inspired me to begin performing comedy. Gallery X combined 'outsider' art, industrial music, and performance art. Some of the performance art at Gallery X was funny and would have been called 'alternative comedy' in NYC... people like Jeff Falk, or Petrisko and Miskowski's 'Coalition for the Bitter Bean'.

Bruce McNall's book, Fun While It Lasted, describes dealing with Robert Hecht.

After bidding vigorously at a Münzen und Medaillen auction in Bern, McNall is approached by a "thin, aristocratic American" and invited up to Hecht's hotel room.

All around the room were men — Turks, Italians, Greeks — talking and smoking and haggling... I recognized a few of the men from the crowd at the auction, where they had obviously been studying the buyers and the market prices. These were the fellows who pulled you aside during a break, reached into their pockets and brought out a few glittery prizes for you to buy at a special price. Some of them were tough guys...

McNall also says the antiquities sold by NFA "would be supplied mainly by Bob Hecht. In fact, I hardly ever acquired pieces from anyone else. Our arrangement allowed me to bring in pieces for display, sell them, and then split the proceeds with him...." McNall would loan pieces to the Getty Museum, then "bring potential customers in to view it. Think about how that affected someone new to the world of ancient art. I was showing them pieces on display in a world-renowned museum, which they could then by for themselves."

New York Sale catalog online

The New York Sale catalog is online at http://www.sixbid.com/home/auctions/mmamerica/mma11/a11.htm.

The New York Sale is the annual coin auction run by three firms: Baldwin's, M&M (Washington DC) and Dimitry Markov.

Bhutan gets new antiquities law

http://www.kuenselonline.com/article.php?sid=6310

I had to look up some of the terms; "dzongs" are Buddhist fortresses. "lhakhangs" are Buddhist temples.

"Chapter two of the Act asserts that all Kusung Thukten and properties of the dzongs and lhakhangs, be it new or old, will be listed and registered jointly by the representatives of the Zhung Dratshang...."

"Except for valuable properties, tensum, ritual objects and old handicrafts can be sold and taken abroad with a written permit and the object sealed by the department of culture."

"The chief of the cultural properties division of department of culture ... said ... the purpose was to retain the antique pieces within the country. 'People have the misconception that this is harassment, but it is not so'"

Giant coins by Ted Stanke

Ted Stanke makes large sculptures depicting coins and the dollar. Some of them are on display in Brooklyn.

"Fair Use" and photocopying journal articles

There has been a lot of discussion of US copyright law and "Fair Use" on Moneta-L this weekend.

It seems to be a popular belief that Xeroxing complete articles from magazines and journals is a "Fair Use". This isn't so; each article is a complete work.

The Fair Use doctrine isn't a clear law with numbers and percentages that you can stay under and be safe. A good article on Fair Use is "The Fair Use Doctrine Part II" by Lloyd L. Rich.

Rich gives several examples:

• Publishing 300 words (1%) from Gerald Ford's memoir was NOT fair use.
  
• Putting unpublished Scientology materials (religious) online WAS fair use.
  
• Copying entire scientific articles from journals was NOT fair use.
  

The case that seems most related to my arguments on Moneta-L is AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION v. TEXACO.

I'll summarize.

• Texaco's library maintains three subscriptions to "The Journal of Catalysis"
  
• Monthly issues of "Catalysis" run ~200 pages and have 20-25 articles
  
• Dr. Donald H. Chickering photocopied eight articles from the journal.
  
• Chickering believed data from these articles would facilitate his research.
  
• Chickering's copying was NOT FAIR USE.
  

In this case it was worthwhile for the journal publisher to sue because Texaco had 400 other scientists doing the same thing and there was an agreement that the finding for Chickering would apply to all of them.

Copyright Law is not criminal law. It isn't a sub-section of the "theft" law. It is a complex set of rules and judicial precident designed to determine who should win a lawsuit and the damages to award. Copyright law was never designed to make sense for an individual Xeroxing a few articles as background for another article.

Most writers want their works read and cited. There is nothing unethical about copying these works for research. We can be pretty sure that publishing in technical journals that pay in free-copies-of-the-journal is a good sign the author will not feel cheated if his work is photocopied. Letting a work fall out-of-print is another way authors show us that they are not interested in squeezing every last cent out of a work.

Gemini II auction catalog online

Harlan Berk and Freeman & Sear are holding a live auction January 10th. The catalog is online.

200 lots of Greek, 328 lots of Roman, plus Byzantine, medieval, Islamic. All high quality stuff. Includes one of five known Poros dekadrachms minted under Alexander the Great and presented to troops on his Indian campaign.

Web site is terrible. The pictures aren't clickable. The main page presents tiny thumbnails of great coins like the dekadrachm that aren't links!

Robert Hecht

Suzan Mazur is writing an excellent series on Robert Hecht for the New Zealand web site "Scoop"

[new]
Bob Hecht, The Younger

Sotheby's & The Signed Euphronios

The Provenance Of Bob Hecht

Euphronios Ancient Art In Court

Hecht must have been a top-level ancient coin dealer. A Bloomberg.com article by Vernon Silver quotes a Boston MFA spokewoman saying the museum has "1,317 items from Hecht", and "excluding coin collections... 116" implying Hecht sold the museum 1201 coins!

I am thinking of starting a blog

I am thinking of starting a blog. What shall it be about?