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: Indian IT and BPO companies are waking up to a new market reality: intellectual property (IP) infringement, data theft and mass poaching of employees on an unprecedented scale. Their loss is not confined to monetary aspect alone. It is attributed to huge liabilities, razing down many person years of effort, unauthorised sale of products from fragrant violation of IP rights and the loss of business due to suspension of operations. Rising litigation costs and protracted court battles only add to their woes.
Consider this. New Delhi-based ITpreneurs Services Pvt Ltd has alleged that it has been gravely hit by the acts of a Dutch company. The latter is accused of committing data theft, IP infringement and mass poaching of its employees. The data allegedly stolen includes digital products under development besides various software tools and confidential papers of the Indian company. According to ITpreneurs, the data was illegally copied and stolen from its computers and servers. Infringement on copyright was through sale of IP by the Dutch company to several international customers through internet-based servers and as classroom material of which the Indian company had already secured copyright registrations in India. The company has reported the matter to the Company Law Board (CLB), the Dutch Embassy and Delhi Police.
The incident is not an isolated one in the IT and BPO industry. Allegations of call centre employees based in India stealing data outsourced to Indian service providers are increasingly being reported. Recently, Gurgaon-based Calance lodged a case under the IT Act and Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code against four of its former employees. The charge is that the employees had stolen software developed by Calance. In a related incident in Chandigarh, a software development firm, Acme India, charged one of its employees of stealing a program developed during his stay in Acme. The allegation is that another IT major was using this software illegally.
A medium-sized Noida-based company, not willing to be named, has seen a mass scale attrition of the cream of their company to a client who on the one hand continues to give them business and on the other hand, has been hiring the cream of the company. This company would not do anything yet and hope that the client would mend their ways. An Okhla-based BPO is seeing mass scale attrition as its takeover bid by its client is well known. This continues to bring the value...
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