Justice Endlaw of the Delhi High Court has dismissed a lawsuit that Tech Plus Media Pvt limited had filed against its former employees who started a new publication after allegedly copying their visitor (or, we assume, newsletter) database, reports SpicyIP. The judgement states that "...the said databases are nothing but a collection of the e-mail addresses of the visitors to the website/news portal of the plaintiff. The plaintiff cannot be said to be the author or composer or having any contribution in the same." Read the judgment here. The Case: Copying the database as copyright violation? Tech Plus Media publishes ITVarNews.Net and a print publication called IT Price VAR, and it alleged that its former employees (Jyoti Janda and Rajeev Ranjan Jha) had started a website called thenewsxpress.com (appears defunct now), with similar content/services as Tech Plus Media, pricing the services at half the rate. TechPlus claims that they found that the defendants had copied confidential information and databases on a pen drive and emailed it to their personal e-mail IDs. What The Court Said - What contribution did TechPlus make to create the database? "The plaintiff, save for repeatedly referring to databases has not specified as to what those databases pertain to and what is the contribution of the plaintiff thereto. From what has been argued, the said databases are nothing but a collection of the e-mail addresses of the visitors to the website/news portal of the plaintiff. The plaintiff cannot be said to be the author or composer or having any contribution in…
