Six booked for stealing source code of firm

The director of a software firm registered a first information report (FIR) on Friday with the cyber cell of the Mumbai police crime branch against six persons including two directors of a private firm, which allegedly stole his source code used for making a software. No arrests have been made so far.

As per the FIR, the complainant and the accused firm had struck a deal but the latter didn’t pay the entire amount of around Rs 25.50 crore for the software and continued to use it under another name. The alleged crime has been committed in connivance with four former employees of the complainant’s company, all of them being software developers.

The complainant Devesh Negandhi is director of Intellect Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Mr Negandhi’s company had developed a software using their unique source code. This software’s applications comprise trading terminal, risk management system, order routing system, exchange connectors, charting, technical analysis etc.

Mr Negandhi’s firm struck a deal with the accused firm’s directors, who required the software for their clients, who are stock brokers. Using the software, the stockbrokers allow access to terminals to their clients and clients can execute trade through these applications.

In January last year a Statement Of Work (SOW) was signed between the two firms, which contained the lock-in period of this software applications for two years, i.e. it could not be used beyond this period without a licence renewal. The accused firm has 8.5 lakh clients and as per the SOW it had to pay Rs 300 per licence given to a client, which totals up to Rs 25.50 crore. Mr. Negandhi’s four employees left the job in January last year and joined the accused company. In May last year he learnt that his software was still being used by the accused firm under another name ‘Helper Utility’. They only gave him an advance of Rs 15 lakh. “They also stole my script data used for technical analysis of price movement of every stock. I had collected and maintained the data since 2000,” Mr. Negandhi said.

“I downloaded the Desktop Trading Software from the accused’s website and installed the setup as a result of which a file named HelperUtility.dll got extracted on my computer. Upon verification of the source code of HelperUtility.dll I understood that the code was identical to the source code developed by my former employees. I collected evidence and armed with it approached the police,” he said.