Germany, 25 March 2003.

In the presence of a crowd of internet publishers' delegates observing the court hearing, on Thursday, the lawsuit at Munich Higher Court between the Würzburg located publishing company Mainpost and the inventor of the searching engine NewsClub, Christian Kohlschütter, has been terminated.

It was clarified that the following interests are taken for granted:

1. NewsClub does not depend on covering Mainpost's online articles on behalf of NewsClub's users that are redirected from the searching engine to the original pages of Mainpost by simple linking.

2. The coverage of Mainpost articles had already been stopped before the lawsuit began (in December 2000).

3. The formal confirmation of these circumstances by declaring a cease-and-desist agreement does not hurt NewsClub. According to the common interests of the search engine users, Kohlschütter has no demand for Mainpost's local-area news reporting.

4. The court denoted that in case of a continuation of the lawsuit, an amount of 5,000 Euros advance for paying an internet expert would be taken into consideration.

5. For damage-limitation reasons (avoiding unnecessary legal expenses), both parties accepted.

6. By agreeing to comply with the cease and desist agreement, the Mainpost accommodated Kohlschütter by abandoning its claims of demanding compensation and further information that had been determined by Munich Regional Court first instance court.

7. The relevant question of law that was decisive in the litigation between Mainpost and NewsClub/Kohlschütter will be answered in the Paperboy lawsuit at German Federal Court, anyway. There is no need for a "double clearance" of the same law problem.

8. It should be stated that NewsClub will continue its normal business activity without any limitations or qualitative loss.

9. The amount in controversy has been set to 250,000 DM (~ 128,000 $ USD).

10. The inventor and maintainer of NewsClub, Christian Kohlschütter, commented
that he was contented that Munich Higher Court's judges, different from Munich Lower Court's attitude, had not taken actions to encourage confrontation between both parties.

You can find more detailed information about the case at http://www.newsclub.de/prozess, including documents, sentences, pleading, press releases and links for further information.

About NewsClub

NewsClub offers the web community a searching engine for news. Currently, it covers more than 100 different news sources. The user can search by news category and headline, being relegated by a web site link to the publisher's web page containing the desired article. The user receives the page directly from the publisher's server, including all contents, advertising, etc. There is no in-frame linking, and each news headline includes the publisher's name.

Inventor and maintainer of NewsClub is Christian Kohlschütter, student of Software Engineering, 23 years old. He is working on searching technologies for more than four years. Besides NewsClub, he developed other searching engines – the most recent one is the Fuzzy Gazetteer, a world-wide place name searching engine supporting imprecise queries. The Fuzzy Gazetteer has been developed in cooperation with the ISODP Project at FH Hof and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate contacting us:

NewsClub
Christian Kohlschütter
Marienstr. 59
D-95028 Hof
Germany

Tel. +49 (0) 9281 8169106
Fax. +49 (0) 9281 8169104
E-Mail: ck@newsclub.de

http://www.newsclub.de

Publication permitted with no extra cost, voucher copy kindly requested.