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December 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Sourcefire IPO complete with IP hassle
Via 451 CAOS: Snort creator Sourcefire addresses lawsuit from rival NetClarity
In court filings, among other things, it seems that PredatorWatch is asking this question: Did Check Point discover anything in its due diligence – the process investigating the provenance of the technologies Check Point was buying - which might relate to the lawsuit?The suit alleges that after PredatorWatch approached Inflection Point Ventures in June 2004 for an investment and possible partnership with Sourcefire, IPV called in Roesch to review PW's technology. IPV admits PW gave it a slide deck marked ‘Corporate confidential and trade secret' and ‘Copyright,' and that PW CTO Gary Miliefsky presented it to IPV. It admits Miliefsky told IPV that PW had patent applications pending. PW claims the presentation contained confidential and proprietary trade secret information about architectural features and operational mechanics of its product. The suit claims that a year later, Sourcefire upgraded its RNA/3D system to provide this functionality.
The response in court filings is unambiguous: IPV denies showing the information to Roesch; Roesch denies the key conversation that Miliefsky says took place between them, and also denies seeing anything confidential of PW's. Sourcefire denies all substantive accusations.
It's amazing to me that there can be IP questions when source code is readily available for review.
Good luck Sourcefire. We're pulling for you.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on December 19, 2006 09:24 PM
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Dave- I think you miss the point on this one. I don't think the suit is about a similarity in source code, but ripping off of the idea. I doubt source code was ever shown or shared, but a ppt discussing features and functionality was probably shown to the VC. However, most VC's I know would never sign the NDA and doubt it happened here. I however think that at the end of the day this suit does not have much merit. I wrote more about this on my blog at:
http://www.stillsecureafteralltheseyears.com/ashimmy/2006/12/the_pot_calling.html
This lawsuit has nothing to do with open source. The claim is that these features were integrated into Sourcefire's RNA appliance, which is a closed source product.
In any case, this is a silly claim. VCs do not sign NDAs just for this purpose and its common knowledge that you should not present trade secrets to them. Not to mention that if they didn't want Marty Roesch to be involved they should have disqualified him as a competitor.
This smells of management ineptitude to me.
Posted by: Misha at December 20, 2006 04:43 PMIt's probable that I missed the point. I just can't see how there is any merit to a lawsuit over an idea.
Also--please comment here rather then trying to drive traffic to your own blog. We are happy to link but it's annoying for readers
Posted by: Dave Rosenberg at December 20, 2006 09:27 PM
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