Beardmore v. Jacobson, 9/16/15
April 20, 2017
In a dispute over ownership of a smart phone application, the court denied plaintiffs’ claim of conversion because the limited exception to the tangibility requirement under Texas law did not apply. The documents referred to by plaintiffs, a booklet and a pitch deck, were not the sort of paper certificates or documents embodying ownership rights to which courts had applied the doctrine of merger. Claim of theft of trade secrets under Tex. Penal Code Ann. ? 31.05 was preempted by the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C.S. ? 301, as all of the alleged acts concerned information contained entirely with a copyrightable software program, and all of the alleged acts corresponded to exclusive rights under copyright. Plaintiffs failed to show misappropriation of trade secrets, and conclusory allegations failed to state a claim for copyright infringement. The court granted the defendant’s motion for summary judgment.