OneDomain sued for copyright infringement
Tapscan claims in a federal lawsuit that Birmingham competitor OneDomain Inc. infringed on its copyrighted computer code that runs software products for broadcasters, reported The Birmingham, AL News.
Tapscan, a subsidiary of Marketron, filed the suit in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of NY. It seeks monetary damages and an order banning "reproducing and distributing the Tapscan Code in various software products."
The code, Tapscan says, serves as the backbone of products that enable television, radio and cable salespeople to convert market share and viewership data from A.C. Nielsen into formats for selling advertising time slots and managing ad contracts.
OneDomain's lawyers are reviewing the complaint, said Charles Welden, a co-founder and chief executive of OneDomain. "We don't believe there is a real basis to this," he told the paper.
The suit is the latest development in a dispute between Tapscan and OneDomain. In a 2003 Jefferson County, AL Circuit Court lawsuit (10/17/04 RBR #204), Tapscan charged that senior OneDomain employees who had worked at Tapscan had misused Tapscan's trade secrets and other confidential materials. The case is pending.
In the latest case, Tapscan claims OneDomain copied and used Tapscan code in its software products, specifically one it sold or licensed to SQAD Inc. in New York. The complaint says the copying was blatant in that "OneDomain did not even bother to disguise its infringement," leaving references to Tapscan and the code in its product.
The suit says the source code is not publicly available.
"We now know that OneDomain has copied substantial amounts of the source code for our products," Marketron CEO Mike Jackson said. "Our intellectual property is a core asset and we will vigorously pursue this litigation. No one but Marketron and its subsidiaries should be selling our computer code."
Welden said OneDomain analyzes TV ratings and develops and markets software so broadcast salespeople can sell time slots to advertisers. The company began offering its software in November 2003 and serves 150 TV stations across the nation, Welden said. Two of the five stations in Alabama are in Birmingham.
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