Social Media & Non-Competition Clauses

In our earlier post ( Are Non-Competition Restrictions Enforceable?), we reviewed "restrictive covenants" - these are clauses under which employees are bound by restrictions such as non-competition restrictions, non-solicitation obligations, and other controls on the employee's behaviour which bind the employee after termination.

In Eagle Professional Resources v. MacMullin, 2013 ONSC 2501, the court considered a dispute between two competitors - Eagle and Maplesoft.

Eagle alleged that its ex-employees took confidential information from Eagle, and began soliciting clients, employees, and contractors of Eagle to work for Maplesoft. The defendant ex-employees argued that they did not use any confidential information to solicit business. They asserted that any contact information that they used was already publicly available through LinkedIn or Facebook accounts.