ClearOne Granted Temporary Restraining Order.SALT LAKE CITY -- On June 26, 2008, the United States District Court United States District Court In the U.S., any of the 94 trial courts of general jurisdiction in the federal judicial system. Each state, as well as the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, has at least one federal district court. entered an order granting ClearOne's request for a temporary restraining order temporary restraining order: see injunction. ("TRO TRO - tail recursion optimisation ") against any sale or transfer of ownership of certain assets of WideBand Solutions, Inc., a Massachusetts Corporation to WideBand Solutions, Inc., a Georgia Corporation. The TRO is related to ClearOne's lawsuit styled, ClearOne Communications, Inc. v. Andrew Chiang, et. al. Civil No. 2:07-co-37 TC in which ClearOne alleges, among other things, theft of intellectual property and copyright infringement. The TRO provides that "ClearOne has met the elements necessary for issuance of a TRO to preserve the status quo [Latin, The existing state of things at any given date.] Status quo ante bellum means the state of things before the war. The status quo to be preserved by a preliminary injunction is the last actual, peaceable, uncontested status which preceded the pending controversy. ," and imposes certain prohibitions against any sale or transfer of ownership of certain of the Defendants' assets, consisting of certain computer code and algorithms related thereto. The TRO also states that none of the Defendants' profits from the Disputed Code shall be transferred or conveyed to the Georgia entity. The TRO is in addition to the preliminary injunction A temporary order made by a court at the request of one party that prevents the other party from pursuing a particular course of conduct until the conclusion of a trial on the merits. A preliminary injunction is regarded as extraordinary relief. order granted by the Chief Judge of the United States District Court, the Honorable Tena Campbell on October 30, 2007, which precluded WideBand from further work on or delivery of certain computer code found to have been developed using ClearOne's intellectual property, to a company doing business with WideBand. Specifically, the order states that "Dr. Yang, as well as his agents, servants, officers, employees, entities and those acting under his direction and control, are hereby enjoined from working on or delivering any computer code - either source code or object code" to the other company. In reaching its decision, the Court found that Dr. Yang was subject to a valid and enforceable Confidentiality, Non-Competition, and Invention Assignment Agreement (the "NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) An agreement signed between two parties that have to disclose confidential information to each other in order to do business. In general, the NDA states why the information is being divulged and stipulates that it cannot be used for any "), and that ClearOne had demonstrated "a substantial likelihood that ClearOne will succeed on its claims that Dr. Yang violated the NDA" and derived the code that WideBand was attempting to license from code belonging to ClearOne. On June 19, 2008, ClearOne filed a separate action in the United States District Court, District of Utah, Central Division, against WideBand Solutions, Inc., a Georgia corporation ("WideBand Georgia") and Donald Bowers and brings claims, among others, for declaratory judgment declaratory judgment In law, a judgment merely declaring a right or establishing the legal status or interpretation of a law or instrument. It is binding but is distinguished from other judgments or court opinions in that it includes no executive element (an order that , fraudulent transfer under Utah Code Ann. u 25-6-1, et. seq., and misappropriation misappropriation n. the intentional, illegal use of the property or funds of another person for one's own use or other unauthorized purpose, particularly by a public official, a trustee of a trust, an executor or administrator of a dead person's estate, or by any of trade secrets. |
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