The recent case of IPC Global Pty Ltd v Pavetest Pty
Ltd (No 3) [2017] FCA82, provides a textbook example of how
not to create a competitive start-up.
A group of senior employees left IPC and started up Pavetest in
competition. IPC was the dominant player in marketing software to
determine the material strength of concrete pavements and the new
start up Pavetest produced a similar software product.
In leaving, they took a copy of the source code for the software
product and gave it to a programmer to recreate a competitive
product. The programmer referred extensively to the IPC software
when producing version 1 of the Pavetest product.
IPC sued the new start up under both copyright and breach of
confidence. Under copyright, the core issue was one of whether a
"substantial part" of the software had been reproduced.
Although IPC's software contained about 250,000 lines of source
code, a large amount of this had been replicated in internal
libraries, and it was
