CA Tuesday announced it had settled its lawsuit against Rocket Software, which accused the latter vendor of copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation.
The case, which has been scheduled for jury selection this week, was settled without Rocket executives admitting to any wrongdoing, but with the company agreeing to license source code from CA.
“As part of the settlement, Rocket has agreed to license technology from CA, including source code authored several years ago and related trade secrets that were the subject of the litigation,” a CA press statement said.
The lawsuit began in August 2007 when CA asked for more than $200 million in damages from Rocket allegedly because four engineers at a CA subsidiary stole source code before taking new jobs at Rocket, where they used the code to build six database-administration software products for IBM’s DB2 database in half the time it took CA to build almost identical products, the complaint filed at the time stated.
In spring 2008, CA announced it had more evidence against Rocket by mean of an expert witness who had signed a sworn affidavit detailing his findings that the source code in Rocket Software’s DB2 Log Analysis Tool and DB2 Query Monitor are “identical or virtually identical” to copyrighted source code written years ago by CA programmers.
“We are pleased with the resolution,” said Amy Fliegelman Olli, executive vice president and general counsel for CA, in a press statement. “This settlement will ensure that customers will not face any business disruption, while guaranteeing that CA is properly compensated for its intellectual property. CA will continue to take whatever steps necessary to ensure the protection of its intellectual property.”
