Campus Eai India Pvt Ltd v. Neeraj Tiwari & Ors

RAJIV SAHAI ENDLAW, J. MARCH 29, 2019 "bs" (corrected and released on 19th April, 2019)

* IN THE HIGH COURT OF DELHI AT NEW DELHI % Date of decision: 29th March, 2019. + CS(OS) 482/2016 & IAs No.11735/2016 (u/O XXXIX R-1&2 CPC), 11736/2016 (u/O XXVI R-9 CPC), 7876/2017 (u/S 151 CPC), 17171/2018 (u/S 151 CPC) & 17172/2018 (u/O XIII-A CPC) CAMPUS EAI INDIA PVT. LTD. .... Plaintiff Through: Ms. Anuradha Salhotra, Ms. Achal Shekhar and Mukul Kochar, Advs. Versus NEERAJ TIWARI & ORS …...Defendants Through: Mr. Ankit Relan, Ms. Ekta Sharma and Mr. Vishesh Kumar, Advs. for D-1. Ms. Julien George, Ms. Anu Paarcha and Mr. Arjun Gadhoke, Advs. for D- 2 to 5. CORAM: HON'BLE MR. JUSTICE RAJIV SAHAI ENDLAW 1. The plaintiff instituted this suit against defendants No.1 to 6 namely (i) Neeraj Tiwari; (ii) Girish Kumar; (iii) Shivendra Kaushik; (iv) Raoul Ghosh; (v) Orryworx Private Limited; and, (vi) Bigrock Solutions Limited, pleading (a) that the plaintiff is the exclusive subcontractor and successor in interest to CampusEAI Inc., a software information technology services and consulting company incorporated under the Laws of Ohio; (b) that the plaintiff has developed and markets a single sign-on solution for institutions of higher education in the United States and other countries; (c) that the plaintiff"s single sign-on solution known as QuickLaunch SSO, is a cloud based, self-service, Identity-as-a-Service application integration platform that helps schools, colleges and universities to integrate their applications irrespective of their integration protocol; (d) that the plaintiff has invested considerable money and resources in developing goodwill and has spent millions of dollars in formulating, developing, marketing/advertising and implementing its trade secret and copyright protected QuickLaunch SSO application; (e) that the defendant No.1, at the time of institution of the suit was still an employee of the plaintiff and the defendants No.2 to 4 are ex- employees of the plaintiff; (f) that the defendants No.1 to 4 have stolen the plaintiff"s copyright, trade secret, technical proprietary, confidential information and Intellectual Property in respect to the aforesaid software from the plaintiff"s computers, databases and development and repository sites; (g) that after extracting the information, the defendants packed it as their own under the name Loginology, to try and sell the same to the plaintiff"s current and prospective customers/clients; (h) that the defendants No.2 to 4 are also promoters/directors of defendant No.5 incorporated on 28th June, 2016 and running the website www.loginology.com which offers an identical application to the plaintiff"s QuickLaunch SSO application; (i) that the defendant No.6 is the Registrar of the domain name www.loginology.com; (j) that the defendants No.1 to 4, at the time of their employment with the plaintiff were working at a senior level under the confidentiality and employment agreements including the terms of the plaintiff"s Employee Handbook and were directly and actively involved in development of the subject software for and on behalf of the plaintiff; (k) that the defendants, under their agreements with the plaintiff were not entitled to take any other employment while working with the plaintiff and the agreement also had a non-compete clause restraining the defendants from taking up competing assignments for a period of two years, after leaving the employment of the plaintiff; (l) that in or around February, 2016, the defendant No.1 started taking unauthorised leaves and on account whereof disciplinary proceedings were initiated against the defendant No.1 and the salary of the defendant No.1 for the month of June, 2016 withheld; (m) that on account of defendant No.1 absconding from employment, the plaintiff took back the company issued laptop assigned to the defendant No.1 as part of his duties as a Software Developer; (n) that on reviewing the data on the said laptop, some applications recording nefarious activities of the defendants as herein below mentioned were found;