QSRSoft, Inc. v. Restaurant Tech., Inc., No. 06 C 2734, 2006 WL 3196928 (N.D. Ill. Nov. 2, 2006) (Der-Yeghiayan, J.).
In this trade secret and copyright dispute, Judge Der-Yeghiayan granted the individual defendants’ motion to dismiss plaintiff’s conversion claim because it was preempted by plaintiff’s Illinois Trade Secrets Act claim. The Court, however, denied the remainder of the motion. The remainder of the challenged the sufficiency of the pleadings generally, as well as each count specifically. The individual defendants argued that each of the counts was not sufficiently plead because plaintiff failed to specifically identify each defendant by name, instead they were collectively referred to in the allegations as “defendants.” The Court held that the general references to the “defendants” were more than sufficient to put defendants on notice of the alleged acts.
The individual defendants challenged plaintiff’s trade secret claim arguing that plaintiff had no trade secrets because it gave the password to its password-protected database of alleged trade secret information to one of the defendants without a license or nondisclosure agreement restricting the defendant’s use of the database’s information. But plaintiff alleged that it gave the defendant a password to its trade secret database after sending the defendant a copy of its license for the database and pursuant to an understanding that the defendant would sign the license or otherwise be bound by it prior to using the password. The Court held that these allegations were sufficient to show that plaintiff had protected its trade secrets and were not proof that plaintiff had released its trade secret to the public.