Autodesk Australia & TelstraSued for $42 Million

In a suit launched three years ago, Spatialinfo is suing Autodesk Australia and Telstra of Australia for AUS$50 million (about US$42 million). SpatialInfo claims Autodesk authorized Telstra to breach the copyright held by SpatialInfo on its data cleaning and export tools.

Spatialinfo launched its case against Telstra in July 2004; they added Autodesk Australia as a defendant 18 months later. Two months later, Telstra launched a law suit against Autodesk Australia to be partially indemnified for SpatialInfo's claims.

Autodesk applied to be "stuck out," but the court rejected the application. The case is now in the discovery stage in the Australian courts.

Spatialinfo of Englewood CO USA and Melbourne writes software for managing physical and logical utility networks. Its software -- SPATIALnet, SDM, and SPATIALweb -- has been integrated into AutoCAD Map, Autodesk World, and Autodesk MapGuide in order to access to RDBMS data [relational database management system].

Telstra is Australia's telephone company.

I don't have any details on how the code was misused, but I am guessing that someone at Telstra hit upon the idea of using SpatialInfo's code independently of the Autodesk software, perhaps in some home-grown application?

Comments

[Sunith Babu]

I request to autodesk is please try to aviod such problems, this is second in the row after E Bay

[ralphg]

For those perhaps puzzled by Gary Darcy's comment, SpatialInfo's lawsuite is being funded by a public company, IMF, the largest litigation funder in Australia, which only handles cases with claims of AUS$2 million or more. http://www.imf.com.au/

[Gary Darcy]

That is one heck of a phone bill.

The point here who is handling the case!

A publicly listed law firm that only handles
cases that they can win and which they also finance!

Ouch!

Next time be careful.