On August 13, 2020, a Delaware District Court judge granted Defendant Azstrazeneca Pharmaceuticals LP’s motion to dismiss, finding that Plaintiff Lithero, LLC failed to plead a plausible trade secret misappropriation claim under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (“DTSA”).
Lithero’s complaint alleged that Azstrazeneca misappropriated Lithero’s confidential and proprietary information regarding Lithero’s Automated Regulatory Assistant (“LARA”), including information regarding how it is trained and the process by which it learns, as well as “years of past research and development, the current capabilities of LARA coming as a result of that research and development, and detailed plans for future areas of growth.” But none of these allegations were sufficient to survive dismissal at the pleadings stage.Continue Reading Too Much or Never Enough? Another Trade Secret Misappropriation Claim Dismissed
The U.S. Department of Justice has secured yet another conviction against a Chinese national for trade secret theft which is part of a larger push to protect valuable intellectual property.
China’s National People’s Congress has released a draft law for comment that would impose harsher criminal penalties for any trade secret theft from Chinese companies that benefits foreign companies.
On May 22, the Eleventh Circuit clarified trade secrets misappropriation analysis under the Florida Uniform Trade Secrets Act (“FUTSA”), strengthening the trade secret protection offered by the statute. The decision vacated a magistrate judge’s finding that the defendants had not misappropriated trade secretes following a bench trial in the Compulife Software Inc. v. Newman et al. matter (No. 18-12004). The court found error in the magistrate’s failure to “consider the several alternative varieties of misappropriation” contemplated by FUTSA and the magistrate’s reasoning that the public availability of life insurance quotes on the plaintiff’s website “automatically precluded a finding that scraping those quotes constituted misappropriation.”
A Kansas District Court judge recently dismissed a trade secrets misappropriation action between two competing livestock nutrition companies.
Companies and other organizations increasingly must face serious and complex threats to their business and infrastructure. Whether the threat is trade secret theft, rogue insiders, cybercrime adversaries, aggressive competitors, or misconduct by business and supply chain partners, companies should remain constantly vigilant and defense ready. Adversaries, including especially cybercriminals operating exclusively in the digital domain, are often highly motivated, sophisticated, resourced, and innovative. The opaque, pervasive, and global nature of modern digital networked environments presents opportunities for criminals. The sophistication and relentless creativity of these bad actors pose significant challenges to companies and law enforcement agencies in being able to detect, assess, mitigate, attribute, and deter these threats. Because available tools and real-world practices to address these threats often outpace the law, companies are called upon to develop their own comprehensive approaches to investigate and remediate these forms of risk. In doing so, companies must be willing to assume a certain level of risk to effectively investigate and obtain sufficient insight to counter the problems.
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania recently ruled that a forum-selection clause in a former employee’s non-compete agreement may bind their new employer for purposes of establishing personal jurisdiction.
Two South Korean competitors are locked in a heated battle over alleged theft of trade secrets relating to electric vehicle (“EV”) lithium-ion battery technology which is an industry expected by experts to generate over $23 billion in revenues by 2027.
The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois recently unsealed a December 13, 2017 indictment of Chinese national, Xudong “William” Yao, who was charged with nine counts of trade secret theft. The charges stem from Yao’s theft of more than 3,000 files between September 2014 and February 2015, including trade secret information such as source code and technical specifications, from an unnamed suburban Chicago locomotive manufacturer. The stolen documents generally pertain to the Illinois manufacturer’s train control systems. According to the indictment, Yao began downloading files just two weeks after beginning his employment with the Illinois company and continued to download files while simultaneously negotiating for and accepting a job with a Chinese “provider of automotive telematics service systems.” He began working for the Chinese company several months after being fired from the Illinois company for reasons unrelated to the theft of documents, and Yao’s employer did not discover the theft until sometime later.
On April 23rd, 2019, China’s Standing Committee on the National People’s Congress adopted amendments to the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, significantly strengthening China’s protection of trade secrets. The bolstering of intellectual property safeguards in China comes in advance of important trade negotiations between China and the international community, including the United States. The changes to the