Northern California Judge requires Fusion Garage to release joojoo code

This blog has previously chronicled the litigation in the partnership gone bad over the joojoo which is pictured to the right.  As explained before:

Interserve believes that a joint venture exists between the parties wants a preliminary injunction to sequester funds from Fusion Garage from the sales of the device. It argues that there is an imminent need for this injunction because Fusion Garage has money trouble and the money may be gone soon.

Judge Richard Seeborg denied the preliminary injunction and the case moved into discovery.  Now, Interserve (which does business as TechCrunch) seeks discovery under Fed. R. Civ. P. 23 to obtain the source code that operates the joojoo.  Fusion Garage stated that the code is irrelevant to the present litigation, but Judge Seeborg disagreed:

the court finds that plaintiff TechCrunch has shown that the metadata (i.e., programmer’s notes or comments, and other annotations within the source code) in the source code may be relevant to its claims. For example, between September 2008 and November of 2009, the parties collaborated in an attempt to bring to market a tablet computer, which they intended to call the "CrunchPad." [] The metadata and dates of creation and/or modification in the source code may show the nature and extent of the parties’ collaboration. Therefore, defendant Fusion Garage shall produce the metadata to the source code for the joojoo product, including the dates showing when the code was created and/or modified.

He denied the motion for a protective order.   The case is Interserve Inc. et al. v. Fusion Garage PTE Ltd. No. C 09-5812 and the opinion is below the jump.


Interserve v. Fusion Garage MPO