Euro-Cities

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Euro-Cities AG
legal form Corporation
founding June 19, 2000
Seat Berlin , Germany
management Hans Biermann
Branch Card publishing
Website www.euro-cities-ag.de

The Euro-Cities AG is part of a group of companies from the card publishing. This also includes PCS-Satztechnik GmbH, GEKA GmbH and Inselferien GmbH, as a subsidiary of Euro-Cities AG. Full shareholder and sole director of Euro-Cities AG is Hans Biermann. The company is based in Berlin. Euro-Cities AG owns a comprehensive inventory of drawn city maps and maps for the German-speaking area and the Balearic Islands .

The history

Euro-Cities AG was founded in 2000. In the same year Bertelsmann AG sold the city map service to PCS-Satztechnik GmbH. PCS-Satztechnik GmbH then transferred all rights to use the city map service to Euro-Cities AG. The city map service grew steadily under the umbrella of the Euro-Cities; Little by little, more and more cities were set to house numbers until the map was complete in June 2006. Then the company began to expand its product range with another map portal. In December 2009 the map portal Inselferien.de went online. For this purpose, the complete Euro-Cities subsidiary Inselferien GmbH was founded in the following month.

At the same time, Hans Biermann founded GEKA GmbH as early as 2000, the aim of which is, among other things, the distribution and marketing of the online map club Webmaps.de. GEKA mbH also searches for map and image rights violations on the Internet and licenses products from several manufacturers, including Falk .

Products

The city ​​map service is the oldest brand of Euro-Cities AG. Right from the start, it contained the exact map display and depicted aerial photos true to area. The city map service sells map licenses for Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Inselferien.de is an internet map service that offers maps and aerial photos of the Balearic Islands and provides information for German-speaking tourists in the destination area.

The latest product from the group of companies is the online map club Webmaps.de . This card club specializes in the real estate industry. It offers maps, aerial photos and panoramic views from various map publishers. There are also offers from German land surveying offices.

Court judgments

In 2004, Euro-Cities complained before the Berlin Regional Court against Toll Collect , because this company without a license using the program HTTrack have said Uwe Lehmann-Brauns, lawyer of Euro Cities, downloaded 202 megabytes maps (Berlin Regional Court, judgment of 20th July 2004, Az. 16 O 312/04). Toll Collect appealed to the Supreme Court. This was ended by a settlement (Kammergericht Berlin, Az. 5 U 157/04). According to Hans Biermann, the court affirmed an injunction , so that Toll Collect GmbH issued a declaration of discontinuance.

The company is involved in many legal disputes to enforce their copyrights. Litigation often ends through settlement . However, numerous judgments have also been made. As a rule, these are authoritative.

In 2009, the Berlin Regional Court found in an appeal judgment that Euro-Cities AG could only demand 300 euros for an unauthorized view of the city map. The court arrived at this amount by way of an estimate. It was of the opinion that Euro-Cities AG had not provided any evidence that the amount claimed for damages was justified.

In 2013, however, the Constitutional Court of the State of Berlin ruled on this in a decision of 19 December 2013 that a judgment by the same chamber of the Berlin Regional Court from 2011, in which this chamber argued similarly to 2009, and that the court only estimated the damages was, was unconstitutional. The courts today regularly rule that the damages demanded by Euro-Cities should be awarded in the amount demanded. In particular, the Berlin Regional Court, confirmed several times by the Court of Appeal, is no longer estimating the compensation, but rather determining it according to the license price list of Euro-Cities AG.

In February 2012, a warning against the "Open Data Initiative Offenes Köln" was announced. However, it was possible to agree on a donation to a charitable organization.

References to the Abmahntätigkeit Michael Braun (in December 2011 briefly Berlin Senator for Justice and Consumer Protection) became public in December 2011, and Brown, according to Euro-Cities of his law firm partner only once as a lawyer at a meeting in representation Uwe Lehmann-Brauns had worked .

The Federal Court of Justice ruled on February 26, 2014 that it is not a legal error if a court assumes that the map material of the city map service comes from Hans Biermann alone, since he created the key code and the specifications for the cartographic implementation.

With the judgment of June 4, 2014, the Munich Regional Court I ended a legal dispute that had lasted over four years, in which the Munich District Court had incorrectly estimated the reasonable damage in the first instance . The appellate court overturned this decision after an expert opinion was obtained that confirmed the quality of the Euro-Cities maps. The Euro-Cities was awarded the compensation according to their license price list.

On November 19, 2015, the company lost a fundamental litigation at the LG Berlin (according to the press release of the Waldenberger law firm). Also in 2015, the Hamburg Regional Court ruled that it cannot be ruled out that of 174 contracts presented by Euro-Cities AG as evidence, a majority, if not all, had been concluded with a previous warning. The Hamburg district court has awarded Euro-Cities AG only half of its list price as compensation because it is not certain whether Euro-Cities AG would achieve the list price without a warning. The Frankfurt Regional Court agreed with this in a ruling in 2017. It is doubted, however, whether such an uncertainty discount is permissible, because as stated in the judgment of the Frankfurt Regional Court, the estimate must not hang in the air and must therefore be understandable. However, an estimate also depends on an uncertainty discount in the air if no comprehensible considerations can be made as to why the discount should be 50% and not more or less. An appeal was therefore requested for the judgments of the Hamburg and Frankfurt regional courts. The Frankfurt am Main Higher Regional Court has now overturned the ruling from Frankfurt am Main by ruling on December 11, 2018 and awarded Euro-Cities full compensation. With the judgment of April 11th, 2019 - 29 U 3773/17, the Munich Higher Regional Court did not endorse the opinion of the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court and stated in a guiding principle, "License agreements that have been concluded with users to which the rights holder because of a corresponding use without licensing are not suitable to allow conclusions to be drawn as to the amount of the license fee, which is reasonable under normal circumstances ”. Due to the existing divergence from the judgment of the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court, the Munich Higher Regional Court approved the revision.

Antitrust complaint

In 2009, Euro-Cities AG filed a cartel complaint against Google with the Federal Cartel Office. At the end of 2010, the European Union took over major parts of the complaint. When competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia announced at the beginning of 2014 that he wanted to discontinue the antitrust proceedings against voluntary commitments by the internet company Google, Euro-Cities AG announced that it would take legal action before German courts and the European Court of Justice. The antitrust proceedings were not yet over when it became known in May 2014 that Deutsche Telekom and the Open Internet Project initiative of the media groups Axel Springer AG and Lagardère as well as 400 other media companies had also joined the proceedings with antitrust complaints.

Web links

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  1. ↑ Toll Collect steel maps on the Internet. In: Tagesspiegel. August 28, 2004, accessed December 3, 2019 .
  2. ↑ heise online: Counter statement to: "Alleged allegation against Toll Collect for illegal card use". Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Counterstatement to the article "Storm in the House of Cards". In: Heise Online. September 29, 2005, accessed December 3, 2019 .
  4. ^ LG Munich I, judgment of 04.12.2008 - 7 O 330/08 - openJur. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  5. ^ LG Munich I, judgment of June 19, 2008 - 7 O 14276/07 - openJur. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  6. ^ Judgment: “Red Card!” - Copyrights to cartographic works. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Landgericht Berlin, judgment of December 22nd, 2009 - 15 S 9/07 - Trenkler attorney, Darmstadt. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Constitutional Tribunal of Berlin, Decision of 19 December 2013 Az. 152/11
  9. ^ AG Charlottenburg, judgment of November 20, 2012, 225 C 196/12
  10. ↑ AG Munich, judgment of March 31, 2010 - 161 C 15642/09 - openJur. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  11. ^ AG Bielefeld, judgment of September 12, 2013, Az .: 42 C 58/13
  12. ^ AG Stuttgart, judgment of September 26, 2012, Az .: 50 C 4382/11
  13. ^ AG Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, judgment of July 10, 2012, Az .: 2 C 3327/11
  14. ^ AG Düsseldorf, judgment of April 11, 2012, 57 C 9017/09
  15. ↑ KG, judgment of March 21, 2012 - 24 U 130/10, MMR 2013, 52 = ZUM-RD 2012, 331 = WRP 2012, 1002
  16. ^ LG Berlin, judgment of April 20, 2012 - 15 S 9/11
  17. ^ LG Berlin, judgment of April 30, 2013 - 16 S 15/11, ZUM-RD 2013, 549
  18. ↑ Map excerpts on the Internet - Schulz | Sozien - Rechtsanwälte Essen. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  19. ^ Opinion Open Cologne ( online ( Memento from March 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ))
  20. ↑ Network policy ( online )
  21. ↑ taz ( online )
  22. ^ Decision of the 1st Civil Senate of February 26, 2014 - I ZR 121/13 -. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  23. ↑ Munich District Court, judgment of 17.10.2011- 142 C 32411/10 - Attorney Trenkler, Darmstadt. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  24. ↑ Legal news - Law firm Dr. Bahr. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  25. ↑ Mass warnings at a crossroads: Euro-Cities AG is subject to a fundamental legal dispute before the Berlin Regional Court. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  26. ↑ Hamburg Regional Court, judgment of April 21, 2015 - 310 O 70/14 (not legally binding) ( Memento of January 10, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
  27. ↑ Regional Court Frankfurt, judgment of July 13, 2017 - 2-03 O 22/13 ( Memento of January 10, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
  28. ↑ Warning Euro-Cities AG, two judgments at half price - lawyer Trenkler, Darmstadt. Retrieved December 3, 2019 .
  29. ↑ Requirements for proof of license damage in the event of copyright infringement of an online city map Oberlandesgericht Frankfurt_aM Judgment v. 11.12.2018 - 11 U 88/17 :: Online & Law. Retrieved May 27, 2019 .
  30. ^ Higher Regional Court Munich, judgment v. 04/11/2019 - 29 U 3773/17. Retrieved November 30, 2019 .
  31. ↑ mirror ( [1] )
  32. ↑ Reuters ( [2] )
  33. ^ Open Internet Project ( [3] )