D-Info

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

D-Info is the brand name of a German telephone directory - CD-ROM of the company TopWare .

In 1990 Deutsche Postreklame published a nationwide telephone directory on CD-ROM for the first time, but at a price of over DM 3,300  it was only aimed at commercial buyers. In 1994 the first edition of D-Info for Windows 3.11 and Mac was published, which initially sparked a large discussion on data protection . With D-Info it was possible for the first time to acquire millions of private and business telephone and address entries for a low purchase price . In particular, the possibility of an inverse search (which was previously only open to investigative authorities) or the possibility of determining all subscribers at a certain address was controversial . D-Info was distributed by the computer game provider TopWare, in 1994 the CD with approx. 38 million data records cost 49.95 DM.

The introduction was associated with the liberalization of the telecommunications market in Germany in the wake of postal reform , was made possible by it at the beginning of the 1990s the first time, private providers, to the Deutsche Bundespost Telekom access run lists of telephone subscribers and directory inquiry services to offer.

In addition to data protection law, there was also a copyright discussion because the data of the first edition had been scanned from telephone books , for which the telephone book publishers claimed copyright. The company was represented at the time by the lawyer Günter von Gravenreuth . For the second edition, the 34 million data records of the German telephone books in China were typed by local data typists in order to avoid copyright infringement by scanning. The Mannheim Regional Court sentenced the Topware company to compensation of DM 600,000 for this CD-ROM D-Info 2.0 in 2000 because it had not paid Deutsche Telekom for the data.

In the following years CDs with annually updated databases were published.

The D-Info brand is still present on the market today, even though the sales figures for CDs have fallen sharply due to the many free information sites on the Internet.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Basic information: The history of the telephone book in Germany , March 1, 2011 in Das Telefonbuch
  2. ↑ a b Corinna Vis: Telekom achieves partial victory against Topware. In: Der Tagesspiegel . November 26, 1999, accessed December 18, 2011 .
  3. ↑ a b Computer News: Faster than Telekom . In: Focus . No. 31 , July 31, 1995 ( online ).