Symicron

» see symicron.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 1999 I was a schoolkid in Ankara working out how HTML fits together, and the German trademark register was no concern of mine. It has something to do with everybody now, because for roughly two years one entry in it looked capable of taking the hyperlink down. Had a German court accepted that pointing at a file infringes somebody's word mark, every page I was learning to build would have turned into a liability, and not only inside Germany.

Symicron GmbH software engineering was founded in Ratingen in 1989 and spent its working life selling image capture and document management software to companies and to town halls. Its best known product was Gerograph, which handled the photographs taken by speed cameras. Nothing in that catalog explains what the company ended up being famous for.

That started in June 1999, when the lawyer Günter von Gravenreuth began sending warning letters on Symicron's behalf to anyone placing a link to software with Explorer in its name. The first case people noticed involved a community network in Ingolstadt that hosted a copy of the SELFHTML documentation, which happened to point at the FTP Explorer made by an American company. The letters kept going out. They reached private web authors and they reached universities, each one demanding money and a signature on an undertaking.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the letters ~

German law of the period paid the sender of a cease-and-desist letter a fee for the trouble of sending it, which turns a weak claim into a revenue line if you send enough of them. Symicron's Explorer campaign became the example Germans cited when explaining what a serial warning letter looks like once the fee has become the product. Gravenreuth was running a parallel campaign over the word Webspace in the same years.

The resistance was organized in public before it was won in court. Stefan Münz, who wrote SELFHTML and got a letter of his own, worked with the Freedom for Links campaign against the claims. A prize was put up, eventually 2,500 euros, for anyone who could produce an actual Symicron product called Explorer. Nobody ever collected it.

~ the typo that made the mark ~

In 2000 the reason nobody could collect became clear. Symicron had claimed it was selling an Explorer back in 1991, years before Windows 95 attached the name to a file manager, and the evidence offered for that claim was an article in the magazine CHIP. The article was about a multimedia application Symicron had in development. The application was called Explora. CHIP had printed it as Explorer.

The fallback argument was that Gerograph had shipped with an Explorer module bundled in. People went looking for that module at Symicron's customers and did not find it at a single one. In autumn 2001 Münz won at the Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf. In 2002 the German Patent and Trade Mark Office deleted the mark outright, finding that the holder had been acting in bad faith at the moment of filing on 22 September 1995.

~ after the mark ~

Symicron traded on for another three years. On 10 June 2005 the Amtsgericht Düsseldorf opened insolvency proceedings against it for illiquidity and over-indebtedness, and ZDNet reported it five days later under a headline that just called the company the Explorer warning-letter firm. No farewell page exists anywhere, which figures for a business whose entire public reputation had been manufactured by its lawyer.

Two sentences came out of the fight and outlived the company. A word that merely describes what software does cannot be owned by whoever files for it first, and pointing at a page is not the same act as using the name printed on it. Both read as obvious now, which is what winning looks like from a distance of twenty years.

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