combit GmbH: Guarantees of copyright have been endangered
combit GmbH has sold more than 220,000 licenses in the field of contact management, CRM and address management. Regarding development components we are one of the few German companies that is developing the entire product in Germany and is marketing it globally. Customers are primarily companies (e.g. Siemens, Henkel, SAP etc.) but also public administrations such as the Hessian Parliament, Italian Chamber of Commerce, the State Capitals Kiel and Munich, the Landkreistag of Baden-Wurttemberg, the Mecklenburg-Pomerian Parliament etc.
Björn Eggstein
Managing Director
From a letter to the German Members of the European Parliament: "As software producer the value of our company is in the ability of our staff and our intellectual property. Among other factors, our competitivity is guaranteed by the copyright on more than 800,000 lines of program code. These assets are endangered by the software patent directive. The current Council version of the directive proposes that "computer-implemented inventions" are patentable once they make a "technical contribution". Hence the EU proposal's definition of what is technical would make software technical and patentable. combit regards this development as a serious existential threat. Searching ep.espacenet.com on "CRM" (Customer Relationship Management) alone lists more than 300 patents. CRM is pure data processing and business method; and we ask you as legislator not to block the field of our innovation by 20-years monopolies. Some of the 30,000 patents can not be circumvented for they are very broad and part of a communication standard.
In contrast to copyright, independent creations can be blocked by patents. Software copyright can be invalidated by "software patents". E.g. one could be subjected to litigation for using a progress bar or include conversion filters to a certain file format. For this reason we ask you as representatives of the German people in Brussels, to follow the recommendations of FFII and more than 700 SMEs on http://www.economic-majority.com/ in order to prevent patentability of software and any dangers for jobs in Germany."
