Signs bearing the company logo are displayed at the headquarters of SAP AG in Walldorf, Germany. Photographer: Wolfgang von Brauchitsch/BloombergSAP Can't Shake Antitrust, Copyright Suit From Former Joint Venture Partner Teradata
Although a federal judge in San Francisco said that enterprise data analytics and warehousing company Teradata Inc. would have to describe its alleged trade secrets in more detail, he largely denied SAP's motion to dismiss its former partner's lawsuit.
December 13, 2018 at 02:32 PM
3 minute read
A federal judge in San Francisco has largely turned back a request from SAP SE to toss out claims that it pilfered trade secrets and copyrights from a former joint venture partner to create its own competing product.
Enterprise data analytics and warehousing company Teradata Inc. and its lawyers at Morrison & Foerster sued SAP in June claiming that the German enterprise software giant used the companies' joint venture as an avenue to access Teradata's trade secrets and copyrights so SAP could develop its own analytics tool, SAP HANA, which launched in 2010.
SAP's lawyers at Jones Day and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison argued in their motion to dismiss that Teradata hadn't sufficiently described the trade secrets they alleged were stolen, and that the suit fell outside the two-year limit to bring claims under the parties' joint venture agreements and the three-year statute of limitations.
Although U.S. District Judge William Orrick III argeed with SAP that Teradata needed to further flesh out its descriptions of the alleged trade secrets at issue, the judge allowed Teradata's remaining copyright, antitrust, and contract claims to survive. Orrick noted that Teradata claimed it wasn't on notice about the alleged trade secret and copyright theft until after a 2015 article from Der Spiegel. The German news outlet reported that during the joint venture, an internal SAP auditor found the company had misappropriated proprietary information from Teradata.
“Teradata need not plead that it initiated an investigation sometime after 2011 when it also pleads that it lacked any reasonable suspicion of misappropriation until 2015,” Orrick wrote. “Its trade secret claim did not accrue until it discovered the infringement in September 2015,” he continued.
SAP's lawyers had also argued that the Defend Trade Secrets Act, which was passed in 2016, shouldn't be applied to the trade secret allegations in Teradata's suit retroactively. Orrick, however, found that assuming the trade secret information alleged in the suit hadn't been publicly disclosed at the time it was stolen, Teradata could bring a DTSA claim under a “continuing-use” theory.
Neither companies' lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment Thursday.
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