In a decision of February 3, 2015 (X ZR 69/13 “Audiosignalcodierung”), the German Federal Supreme Court has treated interesting questions regarding contributory infringement. The patent in suit concerns a method for transmission of digitized sound signals and contains a number of decoding steps. The German Federal Supreme Court concluded that devices which neither contain components to perform the decoding steps according to the patent nor are offered together with software suitable for starting the decoding, are not to be seen as means in the meaning of Article 10, para. 1 German Patent Act which are related to an essential element of the invention. Means are not yet regarded as means related to an essential element of the invention if they are used for the implementation of a method step which comes previous to the method steps according to the patent claim. This is even then applicable if the previous step is necessary to implement the method steps according to the patent claim and even if such means can, due to their features, exclusively be used for that purpose. For a contributory infringement of a patent related to a method for decoding of data, it is, therefore, not sufficient to offer a database containing data which are suitable for decoding.