CA files $200 million copyright lawsuit against Rocket

CA has filed a $200 million copyright lawsuit against rival developer Rocket Software, alleging that the company hired away developers and stole source code.

CA's complaint, amended from a lawsuit filed in April, was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York Wednesday. CA's original April complaint accused Rocket of misappropriation of trade secrets, unfair competition and behavior, but did not include the copyright complaint or the $200 million claim.

Rocket "knowingly and intentionally stole from CA the source code and development environment," the amended complaint says. CA accuses Rocket of hiring away four software developers from its subsidiary Platinum Technology International and using stolen source code to create six software tools to help manage IBM's DB2 relational database.

A woman answering the phone at Rocket's Newton, Mass., headquarters said, "At this time, there is no comment."

CA accuses its former employees of taking the source code for several database management products to Rocket when they left CA. The lawsuit also alleges that Rocket used CA's proprietary development environment, even adopted the same passwords in the development package, said Gary Brown, CA's director of litigation.

"They basically replicated our development environment," Brown said.

Rocket used the development environment to lure employees away from CA and Platinum, a company CA acquired in June 1999, Brown said.

It took Platinum years to develop its database management tools, including three years to create its Detector performance monitor, CA's complaint said. But by mid-2001, less than 18 months after the former Platinum employees joining Rocket, the company launched a "nearly identical" product and five other DB2 administration tools similar to CA products, CA said in the complaint.

In August 2001, Rocket founder and then-chief operating officer Johan Magnusson Gedda denied that the company had copied CA code after CA had sent a letter of complaint. Rocket conducted an investigation after a CA complaint and "concluded that, in fact, it has acted appropriately," Gedda said in a letter to CA.

"Rocket prides itself on the manner in which it develops its products, and it has taken a number of steps to ensure that its software is the product of its own work," Gedda wrote.

Then in 2004, CA received an anonymous letter saying that Rocket continued to use stolen CA software code to develop its own software. "This same code forms a backbone of product development to this day," said the letter, apparently from a Rocket employee.