Jonathan Hill and Joshua Marshall successfully represented the Claimants (“PQ”) in a copyright infringement and breach of confidential information claim against the First Defendant “Mr Aughton” and a company incorporated by him and his wife. Mr Aughton was a former employee and former director of the First Claimant “PQE” and had worked on statistical process control (“SPC”) software for improving industrial processes. Mr Aughton had developed an SPC program called “ProSPC”, which he alleged was created as a hobby project in his spare time and over which he later claimed ownership. At all times, PQ had asserted ownership of the rights in ProSPC.
PQ alleged that Mr Aughton copied or otherwise made use of ProSPC when he wrote two further programs, “InSPC v1” and “InSPC v2”, after he left PQE. The issues for Zacaroli J were whether PQ owned the copyright in ProSPC; and whether Mr Aughton copied from it when writing InSPC v1 and InSPC v2 (whether directly or indirectly) after his departure from PQE.
PQ’s case on copying was complicated by the fact that no original source code was available for ProSPC and InSPCv1, having been deleted by Mr Aughton. Therefore, PQ relied on de-compiled object code for ProSPC and InSPC v1 to obtain a version of source code to compare against the decompiled code of InSPC v2, albeit it was common ground that a de-compiled code is very different to the original source code. Further, InSPC v2 was written in C# programming language by Mr Aughton whereas ProSPC and InSPC v1 had been written in VB.NET. A such, PQ’s case relied on inference drawn from circumstantial evidence.
Nevertheless, Zacaroli J held on the evidence before him, including Mr Aughton’s admissions in an earlier disciplinary hearing and his inconsistent explanations at the trial, that Mr Aughton had infringed PQ’s copyright and breached his contractual duties of confidentiality by copying from ProSPC in writing InSPC v1 and by copying InSPC v1 in writing InSPC v2.