(Image Source: https://flic.kr/p/55678C)
In an interesting turn of events, we would seem to have a great David and Goliath IPR story on our hands. In proceedings at the Bengaluru City Civil Court, the Pearson’s Indian subsidiary has been restrained from infringing upon the intellectual property of a start-up, New Rubric Solutions. This post discusses the facts and circumstances of the case, based on available news-reports.
Pearson’s is the Goliath in this story, being an international education giant which is also huge in the litigation industry as well, having been part of multiple high-value cases, and in the copyright enforcement sector, where it stringently polices its own copyright. The David, New Rubric Solutions (‘NRC’), is a Bengaluru-based company, represented by Pramod Nair of Artista. NRC is an education services company which has a patent pending on a student assessment and analytics platform ‘Kaleido’, designed to diagnose the specific needs of student and help provide them personalised remediation.
NRC was reportedly earlier in talks with Pearson’s to introduce ‘Kaleido’ in Pearsons-managed schools, but negotiations fell through. As part of this negotiation, NRC conducted a pilot test of its platform in a Pearson’s-managed school, and shared many details of their process. Pearson’s has been accused of infringing the results and analyses from this pilot test by representing the results of the ‘Kaleido’ program as results of its own ‘MyPedia’ program. NRC has cited as evidence, inter alia, a YouTube video where NRC slides had been used by a Pearson’s director verbatim after removing the ‘Confidential’ signs.
Pearson’s, on the other hand, argued that there was no copyright over the data collected at a school that it is managing, and furthermore that the solutions in the YouTube presentation were not the ones developed by NRC but by a separate vendor ‘Report Bee’. The City Court rejected Pearson’s arguments and upheld NRC’s allegations in its order, finding that Pearson’s actions violated NRC’s IP, and restraining it from using the specific results and from infringing on NRC’s IP ‘in any way’.
While news reports are a bit confusing on the issues, it must be noted that the case is still pending, and this is only an interim and temporary order, and the final verdict of the case might be substantially different. Furthermore, we have been unable to find a copy of the actual order, except the details listed on the eCourts website (if any of our readers have further information on this, please do comment!). At the same time, this is an interesting case that I definitely keep an eye on, indicative as it is of a positive turn of events in the start-up litigation culture.