Hanover, Germany - German police said Thursday they had raided 51 booths at the CeBIT computing trade show at the prompting of an Italian firm which pursues breaches of audio compression patents. The day of raids on booths on Wednesday was the biggest crackdown in the history of the annual fair.
Senior prosecutor Hans-Juergen Lendeckel said the mobile phones, screens, sat-navs and other devices as well as advertising brochures seized had filled 68 cartons.
The Italian firm, Sisvel, and its US-based unit say they are charged with enforcing "exclusive worldwide rights" to aspects of the MP3 and MPEG file formats on behalf of big companies including Philips and France Telecom.
It filed complaints in Hanover leading to the searches, which hit companies from China, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands.
"We help patent proprietors to obtain royalties for their intellectual property," said Giustino de Sanctis, chief executive of Audio MPEG, the Sisvel unit.
The company, which describes itself as a patent-management enterprise, has monitored CeBIT exhibitors for several years.
File compression is a type of complex software that enables large audio or movie files to be reduced in size without the entertainment suffering. Companies with patents to certain parts of the programming code demand royalties from others using the technology.
Lendeckel said he could not assess how much in royalties was involved, but said, "The patent-owner companies spent a great deal on research and development." They had a right to prevent free copying.
Senior detective Oliver Stock led 180 police and customs officers during the raids Wednesday.
Initial news reports that a smartphone was accused of being a lookalike proved incorrect.
Natascha Seyfi, a lawyer for Sisve, said the cases involved audio compression software. She added, "It's not right that people make money by selling something which others have invented at great expense."
Paul Behne, a German prosecutor, said culprits faced fines under German law and 20 of them had posted immediate bonds of 1,000 or 500 euros apiece. Most had been cooperative when questioned.
A few were "repeat offenders," said Seyfi. "They are quite tricky. They change their names or reincorporate."
She said she doubted they would be deterred. "My experience over recent years is that some give up, but you can't completely prevent repeat offending."
