Press release 06/21/2006
DirecType® wins lawsuit
Yesterday, the Regional Court of Berlin dismissed the lawsuit of DirectSmile GmbH (formerly newsign) brought against SDV AG and SDV Direct World GmbH (formerly sdz). The first instance court brought the lawsuit to an end, which was pending since April 13, 2005 about the image personalizing technology DirecType®.
sdz Direct World GmbH had developed a system independent software for image personalization, called DirecType® in the year 2003. The Berlin headquartered advertising agency DirectSmile GmbH filed a lawsuit against SDV Direct World GmbH and its mother company SDV AG with the reasoning that the rights of the agency were being infringed on 2005-04-13. In the course, the lawsuit reasoning based itself on claims made from the areas of copyright, trademark law, patent law, and competition regulations (see the press release of DirectSmile, dated 2005-09-02).
After DirectSmile’s attempt to push an out-of-court omission statement, already in March 2004, none of their arguments stood in front of the Regional Court of Berlin upon closer scrutiny. The three judges of the 16th Civil Court Circuit dismissed all arguments one-by-one as without reason directly at the beginning of the court sitting on 2006-05-30. The software DirecType® does not infringe any copyright, trademark, or patent rights of DirectSmile as the judges have stated. The functions of the software are free, and nobody could monopolize them. Also the secrecy agreement, to which DirectSmile referred to, was not infringed with, in any way. DirectSmile then filed an alternative pleading at the end of the court sitting, in order to achieve that the source code of DirecType® and DirectSmile should be inspected by a competent person, as the court verdict could not be declared already on 2006-05-30. Also this filing was dismissed by the Berlin judges as unreasoned.
Christoph Deutsch, Chairman CEO of SDV AG, made his personal conclusions: „We have always believed in the German judicial system. From our viewpoint, this law case was completely inappropriate. Yet, we did not allow ourselves to become insecure. On the contrary: As of July 2006, the completely reworked version DirecType® 2.0 will be available on the market.”
Joern Philipp Hilscher, Shareholding CEO of Deutsch Technologies GmbH is glad about the outcome of the unpleasant court proceedings: “Thus, all of the doubts of our international interest parties, customers, and business partners have been brought out of the world.”
