Kik's defence to RIM's infringement lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

Kik's defence to RIM's infringement lawsuit

blog.davidlam.ca

15 pointspvilchez4 comments

"in the statement of defence Kik asserted that Ted, the CEO of Kik, did not have access to the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) source code while he worked at RIM's BBM team as a Project Coordinator. Kik also denies that Ted had access to RIM's development plans, market research, and other internal reports related to BBM while working as part of RIM's BBM team, as RIM had alleged in its statement of claim."

Once upon a time, Yours Truly was also a Project Coordinator at RIM and that was definitely not true. I was not on the BBM team, but tons of code was publicly browsable in the SCM and I was privy to all documents (PRDs, MRDs, project schedules, etc) which had anything to do with the team I was on. In short, I call BS.

Unfortunately the brief is not searchable, but I'm not sure where David Lam thinks Kik denies that Ted had access to BBM source code. All I see (paragraphs 41-43) are some fairly technical defenses to the confidential information claim (RIM didn't allege any breach of confidence, RIM didn't serve Kik with necessary documents, this claim is beyond the court's jurisdiction).

Am I missing this somewhere earlier?

While I don't dispute anything you're saying, I can also say that in lawsuits like this, it's pretty typical for the plaintiff to generally trump up the role/abilities of the defendants in the suit to try to maximize damages.

That happened to me. I was involved in a suit during the dot-com-bust (I followed my former manager to his startup - they wanted to shut us down), and my role was inflated from worker bee who wasn't on any projects to a senior level manager type with fiduciary responsibilities. That was news to me, because had I actually had that type of role, I probably wouldn't have left in the first place.

Like the blog author says, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Very good point. Somehow everyone is skipping the fact that Ted was a CO-OP STUDENT during his work at RIM.

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