Friday, a jury awarded nearly $1 billion in damages to the American medical software firm, Epic Systems.
The defendant, Tata Consultancy Services, part of the super conglomerate Tata Industries, will appeal the award declaring it “did not misuse or derive benefit from downloading documents from Epic System’s user-web portal.”
The case derived from a Tata employee misidentifying himself in order to access 20 years of Epic’s proprietary information then sharing that access with two other employees in India.
The judge has stated that he is likely to reduce the award.
So.. what, the judge really slapped those Tatas ??
I think it was kind of inappropriate for the Judge to immediately say he was probably going to reduce the award. He’s supposed to review the case first even if he was the sitting Judge.
In any event, the size of the award seems at first glance to be way too high unless the Tata group used any of the proprietary code/methods/procedures in stuff that Tata has since sold. If that’s the case then the cat is out of the bag as far as Epic is concerned as it could end up all over the globe. That said, it may be about time a huge judgement against a foreign company for this sort of theft is given out. I shudder to think how much valuable intellectual property is stolen every year by either hackers of these types of out and out theft/fraud. Mabey a few of these that are actually enforced will make foreign commercial/government entities stop and think.
will the company go TU?
The CEO of Epic, the overpriced government mandated POS, is a huge Obama bundler. Funny coincidence that.
EPIC is in Madison, WI. It’s a hell of an operation. Everyone gets a window view. They have gourmet chefs that prepare meals and bakery (free of charge) for the employees. They even have a private organic farm to grow some of the food. They hire only the top college grads. Employees can even take sabbaticals if needed.
The whole company was the brainchild of two women, a nurse and a programmer.
Nice job if you can get it
Were those tatas by any chance bodacious?
No, they were epic.
India isn’t stealing anything from the American software industry. It’s being turned over to them gratis lock, stock, and barrel.