Lawsuit against searching engine NewsClub – Hard times for Google & Co.!
Your attendance at the hearing is kindly requested

Germany, 12 March 2003.

The creator of the search engine NewsClub.de invites to Munich Court hearing.

Location:
Oberlandesgericht München (Munich Upper Court)
Justizgebäude Prielmayerstraße 5, München/Germany.

Date: Thursday, 20 March 2003, 9.30 am, court room 38/EG.

There is plenty space available – And there is no need for registration.

Plaintiff is a big German news publishing company, defendant is the inventor of the news searching engine NewsClub.de, Christian Kohlschütter, a student of Software Engineering, 23 years old.

The main subject-matter in the lawsuit against the searching engine is the following: Is there are right to retrieve news headlines from public sources? May a searching engine enable the Internet user to find the location of desired information?

The inventor of NewsClub, Christian Kohlschütter, was sued just for linking to the plaintiff's news articles. The plaintiff argued that this linking was a copyright infringement by so called “Deep Linking”as per the EU-wide database directive, especially section § 87b of the German copyright.

In January 2001, NewsClub had won an interim injunction at Berlin in this law case (the sentence became final!). Nevertheless, the publisher managed to move the lawsuit to Munich regional court, and won. Kohlschütter is now calling the appellate court, Munich upper court (OLG München).

The hearing for the appellate proceeding will take place on Thursday, March 20, 9.30 am.

Currently, in Germany, there are other parallel cases against searching engines, such as Paperboy.de or Net-Clipping.de - the NewsClub case at OLG München is very important for the legality of searching engines in general.

If it should become illegal to link from searching engines to websites, the business of Google, Altavista and other searching engines is threatened – searching utility providers are shocked.

The decision is also important for US companies, as their websites are available to German users as well. Therefore, they could also be accused of breaking the law!

Don't miss the decision – March 20, 9.30, OLG München, Germany!

About NewsClub

NewsClub offers the web community a searching engine for news. Currently, it covers more than 100 different news sources. The user can search by news category and headline, being relegated by a web site link to the publisher's web page containing the desired article. The user receives the page directly from the publisher's server, including all contents, advertising, etc. There is no in-frame linking, and each news headline includes the publisher's name.

Inventor and maintainer of NewsClub is Christian Kohlschütter, student of Software Engineering, 23 years old. He is working on searching technologies for more than four years. Besides NewsClub, he developed other searching engines – the most recent one is the Fuzzy Gazetteer, a world-wide place name searching engine supporting imprecise queries. The Fuzzy Gazetteer has been developed in cooperation with the ISODP Project at FH Hof and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission.

You can find more detailed information about the case at
http://www.newsclub.de/prozess, including documents, sentences, pleading, press releases and links for further information.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate contacting us:

NewsClub
Christian Kohlschütter
Marienstr. 59
D-95028 Hof
Germany

Tel. +49 (0) 9281 8169106
Fax. +49 (0) 9281 8169104
E-Mail: ck@newsclub.de

http://www.newsclub.de

Publication permitted with no extra cost, voucher copy kindly requested.