10 ms·

Delta pilot sues the airline for allegedly stealing an app he designed

168 points by rexreed 5y ago

relaunched 5y ago
I've known many entrepreneurs who have jumped to the conclusion that their idea was stolen based on the problem they are trying to solve. Then, they see similarities in the design that reinforce their confirmation bias. The article talks about this huge problem...the genesis of his idea was this problem that 100s of people, in the airline industry, at Delta, all faced - including their technical teams, operations leadership, executives, etc. With all of those folks facing the same problem, it's not unexpected that some come with the same general solution. Practically speaking, whether it was the pilot or the technical team at Delta, anyone building a chat solution would be familiar with the same chat UIs; at some level, when have any of us used an app that had a truly unique design? Many would argue that the UX best practice is to use familiar elements, from popular apps, so not to have to re-educate the user. That doesn't mean they didn't steal the app. However, in my experience, people with all sorts of ideas hit up executives at big companies all the time. That repetition is the basis for brand marketing. It's likely they were pitched a similar solution to that same problem both before and after that person met with their team. Barring some egregious fraud, not mentioned in the article, or some major bad acting, it seems like a hard argument to make.
- erhk 5y ago
  But how often do executives have multiple meetings to entertain ideas?
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    How many other meetings did they have to evaluate equivalent solutions? It's unlikely his was the only solution being entertained.
  - relaunched 5y ago
    This happens more than you would think. Sales people for every startup relentlessly hound execs. Every major tech company / vendor has an innovation team / teams / parnerships that the respective relationship managers try to get in front of execs. It's endless. That's not to mention all the strategy consultants / management consultants love to bring their own innovative ideas to the table.
smoldesu 5y ago
> He told the CEO that he had a solution for issues like that, which resulted in several meetings with executives who gave him verbal assurances that they were going to acquire his app. Another great example of the lawyer's mantra: get it in handwriting!
yoz-y 5y ago
Wouldn’t happen in France where most contracts specify that anything you do, even tangentially related to your work, belongs to the company.
pembrook 5y ago
If I had a nickel for every person who thinks they have an “original” app idea I’d be a millionaire. I’m skeptical there can be any novel tech in a chat tool someone spent $100k to build. But let’s be generous here and assume his story is 100% true; his app was stolen and it is worth $1 billion dollars to the company. Why waste time in a stupid legal battle when you could be selling your app to one of the 5,000 other airlines on earth that likely have the same need? Delta has just proven how useful it is based on the fact that they built it themselves! I highly doubt Delta will be selling internal tech to competitors, so the market opportunity should still be there. If the founders’ time is best spent in a lawsuit with a single potential customer instead of selling to other customers, I’d say that’s a sign it was never a viable business to begin with.
- knodi123 5y ago
  > If I had a nickel for every person who thinks they have an “original” app idea I’d be a millionaire err, hate to burst your bubble, but I already had the idea for making a nickel a pop off of those people, and I'll fight you to the death over it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
neither_color 5y ago
It's also possible that they took his idea seriously but not him seriously. They might have thought "this guy's idea is good but he's a pilot hacking some sloppy code together in his spare time, we'll go with a 'REAL' software firm so our pilot can focus on piloting." It may just be a matter of an employee convincing his employer of the need for the app and then getting outbid by a smooth talking enterprise salesman.
whoisjuan 5y ago
If Delta can produce any evidence that such app ideas were already discussed before he brought his own concept to management he is screwed. Honestly this isn't very novel idea. It's possible that many people came up with this very same idea before he did.
WalterBright 5y ago
This is why design patents exist. If you think your design is special, get a design patent for it. Boeing paid a lot of money over the years to use the design patent of engines in the back used on 727s. Personally, I thought the patent was ridiculous, but that's how the patent system works.
notyourwork 5y ago
It’s hard to see anything beyond “he said, she said” from this article. No real substance to qualify the pilot’s claim.
- unnouinceput 5y ago
  Going from the link to the outage in 2016 where " A widespread computer meltdown is at the heart of the problem" this smells of ransomware attack and the $100K "proprietary QrewLive communications platform" seems more like a multi-role backup and ERP solution than just a simple chat application that the article implies.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  That’s what the courts are there to settle.
  - notyourwork 5y ago
    I agree, the pilot may have a valid claim but the article left me without anything beyond "I built this, they didn't pay me and built it."
- rexreed 5y ago
  One would think that the $100k that was invested and the meetings with the Delta management would be documented somewhere
  - vladmk 5y ago
    Yeah I’m interested in what they knocked off vs what’s unique. Verbal agreements are as good as the paper they’re signed on though - Big Business 101
    - hansvm 5y ago
      > Verbal agreements are as good as the paper they’re signed on though - Big Business 101 Verbal agreements are legally binding in many jurisdictions, but they're hard to enforce for obvious reasons.
anonu 5y ago
I caught a glimpse of the app when an air stewardess sat down next to me on a Delta flight. We had a nice conversation and then she looked me up by seat number and congratulated me on my Delta track record. I believe you could also save notes on each passenger. I thought that was both pretty cool and also interesting that they all had tons of data on any customer within a few clicks.
- mdellavo 5y ago
  That does not seem like the app from the article
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  So basically a CRM?
  - anonu 5y ago
    Probably. CRM overlaid on a plane fuselage diagram
yobbo 5y ago
Even if it's true, so what? Is it illegal in America to borrow ideas? It reads like selling the idea of an umbrella to a wet guy in the rain, and then suing him when later he refuses to pay.
- arghwhat 5y ago
  > Even if it's true, so what? Is it illegal in America to borrow ideas? In some cases, yes. > It reads like selling the idea of an umbrella to a wet guy in the rain, and then suing him when later he refuses to pay. It’s more like the wet guy listening to your pitch, playing with the product to see how it works and then declining as he goes to make an identical one to avoid paying you.
  - vladmk 5y ago
    It reads more like: You show someone that a telephone can save them time. They interview you about telephones. They then decide not to pay you about applying your telephone idea tot heir system and create their own. The value here is really in either a)the consulting or b) your telephone product being so great they can’t copy it. His app idea if he spent 100k and only that nominal amount likely wasn’t that unique or special
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      > a)the consulting Then pay him. If they had no one bright enough to come up with it themselves, they received something of value.
      - vladmk 5y ago
        Agreed
daenz 5y ago
Sounds like he got "brain raped" (term from Silicon Valley show), where they get you into a meeting and coax you to explain all of your secret sauce and then build a parallel product. It is clearly morally wrong, but is it illegal? Does someone here have a legal sense of this?
- defaultname 5y ago
  Alternately he had an idea simultaneously with others having the same idea [1]. An obvious idea. It's entirely possible that his pitch and purported meetings had nothing to do with the eventual app. It's why many firms and creative groups have a strict "don't tell us your `ideas'" policy. In this case his idea was "role-based" communication. He came up with this (2016) as Slack and other role-based solutions were storming across the market. [1] - a common problem coupled with advancements in the field/technology often yield many people "inventing" the same thing simultaneously, because it's an obvious next step. It's why we're so negative of the countless useless "on a computer" patents, "on a network", etc.
  - fouric 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27845534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27845534 responds to this quite eloquently: > It's not about whether more than one person could come up withe idea, it's that he pitched it to his own employer, met multiple times with execs to discuss acquisition, only for them to suddenly cut him off and directly copy what he proposed with no remuneration. > That is not the same as two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something.
    - defaultname 5y ago
      That doesn't disprove that "two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something". It's entirely possible, if not probable, that there was independent efforts to build out "role-based" communications. Some employee comes along and says "Look, I've already developed an app do you want to buy it?". They talk with him and decide that what he has built isn't worthwhile and move on. Suddenly he thinks he has intellectual ownership over the entire premise (hence the hilarious $1B claim). It doesn't work like that. Indeed, stories like this are why many firms simply don't want to listen to any pitches, because people often have a pretty outsized notion about their "inventions". Again, maybe they really did rip off his idea. Maybe in 2016 they really had no idea of broadening their communications approaches (or I guess narrowing in this case). His lawyers can demand the pertinent records and that's what a court case is for. But just seeing this reminds me why I'm very clear in a lot of situations that I don't want people's ideas/inventions, because in almost every case they've been considered but now the person thinks they invented it and have ownership over it.
giarc 5y ago
"The plaintiff has been with the airline for 11 years and still currently works with the company." Suing your employer for $1 billion, bold strategy cotton. I suspect he's about to get a lot of the less desirable route assignments.
- throwawaycities 5y ago
  I doubt it unless Delta wants to defend an additional count of retaliation.
- ibejoeb 5y ago
  Not my favorite scenario, an active captain having a $1B bone to pick with his boss.
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  Nope, it's all seniority based bidding. Airlines are one of the few industries with a strong enough union you can sue your employer for a billion dollars and keep working.
- swarnie_ 5y ago
  I recall a conservation with a pilot in a bar. He claimed they could pick their routes to an extent and had more flex the longer they had been there. He was particularly keen on the London - Australia double header, apparently he made bank on that route.
  - jbgreer 5y ago
    Even better when you consider that some pilots are not domiciled in their route's origin city and for some airlines get paid by blocks of time. I recall a friend talking about pilots that lived in lower-cost areas, commuted to LA for work, then flew SFO - LAX routes, and got paid for their time in-between flights in those cities. They made more money off the plane than on it.
  - tutmeister 5y ago
    My uncle flew A340-600s on that route for years and had a great time. Due to crew rest requirements and seniority, he only flew 2-3 times a month and had a house on both ends. Unfortunately, he also ended up with a family on both ends and that didn't end too well...
mdellavo 5y ago
Doesn't really seem like much original work... a chat app tailored to a specific audience?
nikanj 5y ago
Alas, Delta will simply stall the case until the pilot runs out of funds, or dies of old age
- sodafountan 5y ago
  I'm assuming the pilot could convince the union to fund the litigation if Delta tries to drag their feet, that's kind of what unions are for.
notjustanymike 5y ago
Delta did say the app didn't meet their needs. It's possible the codebase was a patchwork of Bootstrap, PHP, Wordpress, and jQuery UI plugins that could buckle under a production load. It could have been a good idea poorly executed; we just don't know right now.
- kayfox 5y ago
  I am betting one of the needs was integration with their dispatch software.
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  Even if it was a well built app, anyone that's built an app for an F500 company, knows the hoops you have to jump through for things like compliance. There's a good chance the app did what it was supposed to just fine, but Delta couldn't sign on because it didn't have Reporting Requirements, SOC2 Compliant or a litany of other things that an Enterprise would require to sign on.
  - wmeredith 5y ago
    This is a good point. I am currently consulting for a F100 healthcare company, and everything they do is driven by compliance. It's the first and last thing that gets talked about in almost every meeting.
  - ksec 5y ago
    They could still have paid him the $100K as part of the R&D of the App.
    - noahmbarr 5y ago
      I would bet you $100 Delta offered that and more.
    - _fat_santa 5y ago
      I'm willing to bet they did offer him some $$ for the App. He probably asked for $X. Delta countered with $Y.They couldn't come to an agreement so conversations ended and Delta built the same kind of app in-house. Then the guy sues them.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
It's a fairly inflammatory headline and article, but it doesn't actually say very much. I suspect the story stretches out over a long time period, and has lots of variables. I can think of many ways that either side could be cast as villain or protagonist.
joelcollinsdc 5y ago
Is there any IP created because you generated a particular program / interface? Perhaps not the code itself but the end product? In the early stages of my career we were advised to never test out a competitors product for fears that we would inadventently copy something of theirs that was protected, but at my current company we compare our product to our competitors regularly. No risk there?
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  My question is similar -- what ideas are there to patent in a communications app? Isn't it just user profiles and messages?
richardwhiuk 5y ago
I wonder what the pilots contract said. If he was a software engineer, his contract would state that it belonged to his employer.
- NegativeLatency 5y ago
  Depends on the contract, many places I’ve worked if it’s outside of company time and on your own hardware you own it
alberth 5y ago
And in the tech world, this would be the property of the employer. News at 11.
- overscore 5y ago
  In some jurisdictions. Certainly not all.
duxup 5y ago
>carbon copy, knock-off of the role-based text messaging component of [his] proprietary QrewLive communications platform Not to say it isn't a good idea but the limited description seems like an idea that I imagine more than one person could have come up with. That's not to justify the company's actions, but if that is the app I'm not sure how novel a thing we're talking about here and maybe the needs that weren't met were simply back-end tech based and not idea based...? How many 'roughly the same idea but X' start ups are out there? and it's not always the first that succeeds.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  It's not about whether more than one person could come up withe idea, it's that he pitched it to his own employer, met multiple times with execs to discuss acquisition, only for them to suddenly cut him off and directly copy what he proposed with no remuneration. That is not the same as two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something.
  - giobox 5y ago
    No expert, and yes I agree it might be a sharp practice if they substantially lead him to believe they would deal with him, but is this not the purpose patents serve? The app as described in this article at least is incredibly generic - I'd imagine the Delta board members could independently arrive at the conclusion such software features would help and also determine that there may be other options to select that fit their operational requirements better. "Role based text messaging" sounds a lot like a workplace chat app...
    - josefx 5y ago
      Of course they could independently arrive at those ideas, they could independently try them out and see if they are worth it. But why invest what might end up a few hundred man hours in management meetings and trials when you can outsource it to some idiot who didn't even think about getting paid for the initial trial and error phase of the project. Don't talk to people unless you get paid for the time you invested, the guy behind AppGet had to learn that the hard way, as did hundreds of service companies that got used to outsource initial project planing without ever hearing back from their potential customers.

168 points by rexreed 5y ago

I've known many entrepreneurs who have jumped to the conclusion that their idea was stolen based on the problem they are trying to solve. Then, they see similarities in the design that reinforce their confirmation bias. The article talks about this huge problem...the genesis of his idea was this problem that 100s of people, in the airline industry, at Delta, all faced - including their technical teams, operations leadership, executives, etc. With all of those folks facing the same problem, it's not unexpected that some come with the same general solution. Practically speaking, whether it was the pilot or the technical team at Delta, anyone building a chat solution would be familiar with the same chat UIs; at some level, when have any of us used an app that had a truly unique design? Many would argue that the UX best practice is to use familiar elements, from popular apps, so not to have to re-educate the user. That doesn't mean they didn't steal the app. However, in my experience, people with all sorts of ideas hit up executives at big companies all the time. That repetition is the basis for brand marketing. It's likely they were pitched a similar solution to that same problem both before and after that person met with their team. Barring some egregious fraud, not mentioned in the article, or some major bad acting, it seems like a hard argument to make.

erhk 5y ago
But how often do executives have multiple meetings to entertain ideas?
- sangnoir 5y ago
  How many other meetings did they have to evaluate equivalent solutions? It's unlikely his was the only solution being entertained.
- relaunched 5y ago
  This happens more than you would think. Sales people for every startup relentlessly hound execs. Every major tech company / vendor has an innovation team / teams / parnerships that the respective relationship managers try to get in front of execs. It's endless. That's not to mention all the strategy consultants / management consultants love to bring their own innovative ideas to the table.

smoldesu 5y ago

> He told the CEO that he had a solution for issues like that, which resulted in several meetings with executives who gave him verbal assurances that they were going to acquire his app. Another great example of the lawyer's mantra: get it in handwriting!

yoz-y 5y ago

Wouldn’t happen in France where most contracts specify that anything you do, even tangentially related to your work, belongs to the company.

pembrook 5y ago

If I had a nickel for every person who thinks they have an “original” app idea I’d be a millionaire. I’m skeptical there can be any novel tech in a chat tool someone spent $100k to build. But let’s be generous here and assume his story is 100% true; his app was stolen and it is worth $1 billion dollars to the company. Why waste time in a stupid legal battle when you could be selling your app to one of the 5,000 other airlines on earth that likely have the same need? Delta has just proven how useful it is based on the fact that they built it themselves! I highly doubt Delta will be selling internal tech to competitors, so the market opportunity should still be there. If the founders’ time is best spent in a lawsuit with a single potential customer instead of selling to other customers, I’d say that’s a sign it was never a viable business to begin with.

knodi123 5y ago
> If I had a nickel for every person who thinks they have an “original” app idea I’d be a millionaire err, hate to burst your bubble, but I already had the idea for making a nickel a pop off of those people, and I'll fight you to the death over it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

neither_color 5y ago

It's also possible that they took his idea seriously but not him seriously. They might have thought "this guy's idea is good but he's a pilot hacking some sloppy code together in his spare time, we'll go with a 'REAL' software firm so our pilot can focus on piloting." It may just be a matter of an employee convincing his employer of the need for the app and then getting outbid by a smooth talking enterprise salesman.

whoisjuan 5y ago

If Delta can produce any evidence that such app ideas were already discussed before he brought his own concept to management he is screwed. Honestly this isn't very novel idea. It's possible that many people came up with this very same idea before he did.

WalterBright 5y ago

This is why design patents exist. If you think your design is special, get a design patent for it. Boeing paid a lot of money over the years to use the design patent of engines in the back used on 727s. Personally, I thought the patent was ridiculous, but that's how the patent system works.

notyourwork 5y ago

It’s hard to see anything beyond “he said, she said” from this article. No real substance to qualify the pilot’s claim.

unnouinceput 5y ago
Going from the link to the outage in 2016 where " A widespread computer meltdown is at the heart of the problem" this smells of ransomware attack and the $100K "proprietary QrewLive communications platform" seems more like a multi-role backup and ERP solution than just a simple chat application that the article implies.
ashtonkem 5y ago
That’s what the courts are there to settle.
- notyourwork 5y ago
  I agree, the pilot may have a valid claim but the article left me without anything beyond "I built this, they didn't pay me and built it."
rexreed 5y ago
One would think that the $100k that was invested and the meetings with the Delta management would be documented somewhere
- vladmk 5y ago
  Yeah I’m interested in what they knocked off vs what’s unique. Verbal agreements are as good as the paper they’re signed on though - Big Business 101
  - hansvm 5y ago
    > Verbal agreements are as good as the paper they’re signed on though - Big Business 101 Verbal agreements are legally binding in many jurisdictions, but they're hard to enforce for obvious reasons.

anonu 5y ago

I caught a glimpse of the app when an air stewardess sat down next to me on a Delta flight. We had a nice conversation and then she looked me up by seat number and congratulated me on my Delta track record. I believe you could also save notes on each passenger. I thought that was both pretty cool and also interesting that they all had tons of data on any customer within a few clicks.

mdellavo 5y ago
That does not seem like the app from the article
iamacyborg 5y ago
So basically a CRM?
- anonu 5y ago
  Probably. CRM overlaid on a plane fuselage diagram

yobbo 5y ago

Even if it's true, so what? Is it illegal in America to borrow ideas? It reads like selling the idea of an umbrella to a wet guy in the rain, and then suing him when later he refuses to pay.

arghwhat 5y ago
> Even if it's true, so what? Is it illegal in America to borrow ideas? In some cases, yes. > It reads like selling the idea of an umbrella to a wet guy in the rain, and then suing him when later he refuses to pay. It’s more like the wet guy listening to your pitch, playing with the product to see how it works and then declining as he goes to make an identical one to avoid paying you.
- vladmk 5y ago
  It reads more like: You show someone that a telephone can save them time. They interview you about telephones. They then decide not to pay you about applying your telephone idea tot heir system and create their own. The value here is really in either a)the consulting or b) your telephone product being so great they can’t copy it. His app idea if he spent 100k and only that nominal amount likely wasn’t that unique or special
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > a)the consulting Then pay him. If they had no one bright enough to come up with it themselves, they received something of value.
    - vladmk 5y ago
      Agreed

daenz 5y ago

Sounds like he got "brain raped" (term from Silicon Valley show), where they get you into a meeting and coax you to explain all of your secret sauce and then build a parallel product. It is clearly morally wrong, but is it illegal? Does someone here have a legal sense of this?

defaultname 5y ago
Alternately he had an idea simultaneously with others having the same idea [1]. An obvious idea. It's entirely possible that his pitch and purported meetings had nothing to do with the eventual app. It's why many firms and creative groups have a strict "don't tell us your `ideas'" policy. In this case his idea was "role-based" communication. He came up with this (2016) as Slack and other role-based solutions were storming across the market. [1] - a common problem coupled with advancements in the field/technology often yield many people "inventing" the same thing simultaneously, because it's an obvious next step. It's why we're so negative of the countless useless "on a computer" patents, "on a network", etc.
- fouric 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27845534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27845534 responds to this quite eloquently: > It's not about whether more than one person could come up withe idea, it's that he pitched it to his own employer, met multiple times with execs to discuss acquisition, only for them to suddenly cut him off and directly copy what he proposed with no remuneration. > That is not the same as two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something.
  - defaultname 5y ago
    That doesn't disprove that "two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something". It's entirely possible, if not probable, that there was independent efforts to build out "role-based" communications. Some employee comes along and says "Look, I've already developed an app do you want to buy it?". They talk with him and decide that what he has built isn't worthwhile and move on. Suddenly he thinks he has intellectual ownership over the entire premise (hence the hilarious $1B claim). It doesn't work like that. Indeed, stories like this are why many firms simply don't want to listen to any pitches, because people often have a pretty outsized notion about their "inventions". Again, maybe they really did rip off his idea. Maybe in 2016 they really had no idea of broadening their communications approaches (or I guess narrowing in this case). His lawyers can demand the pertinent records and that's what a court case is for. But just seeing this reminds me why I'm very clear in a lot of situations that I don't want people's ideas/inventions, because in almost every case they've been considered but now the person thinks they invented it and have ownership over it.

giarc 5y ago

"The plaintiff has been with the airline for 11 years and still currently works with the company." Suing your employer for $1 billion, bold strategy cotton. I suspect he's about to get a lot of the less desirable route assignments.

throwawaycities 5y ago
I doubt it unless Delta wants to defend an additional count of retaliation.
ibejoeb 5y ago
Not my favorite scenario, an active captain having a $1B bone to pick with his boss.
travisjungroth 5y ago
Nope, it's all seniority based bidding. Airlines are one of the few industries with a strong enough union you can sue your employer for a billion dollars and keep working.
swarnie_ 5y ago
I recall a conservation with a pilot in a bar. He claimed they could pick their routes to an extent and had more flex the longer they had been there. He was particularly keen on the London - Australia double header, apparently he made bank on that route.
- jbgreer 5y ago
  Even better when you consider that some pilots are not domiciled in their route's origin city and for some airlines get paid by blocks of time. I recall a friend talking about pilots that lived in lower-cost areas, commuted to LA for work, then flew SFO - LAX routes, and got paid for their time in-between flights in those cities. They made more money off the plane than on it.
- tutmeister 5y ago
  My uncle flew A340-600s on that route for years and had a great time. Due to crew rest requirements and seniority, he only flew 2-3 times a month and had a house on both ends. Unfortunately, he also ended up with a family on both ends and that didn't end too well...

mdellavo 5y ago

Doesn't really seem like much original work... a chat app tailored to a specific audience?

nikanj 5y ago

Alas, Delta will simply stall the case until the pilot runs out of funds, or dies of old age

sodafountan 5y ago
I'm assuming the pilot could convince the union to fund the litigation if Delta tries to drag their feet, that's kind of what unions are for.

notjustanymike 5y ago

Delta did say the app didn't meet their needs. It's possible the codebase was a patchwork of Bootstrap, PHP, Wordpress, and jQuery UI plugins that could buckle under a production load. It could have been a good idea poorly executed; we just don't know right now.

kayfox 5y ago
I am betting one of the needs was integration with their dispatch software.
_fat_santa 5y ago
Even if it was a well built app, anyone that's built an app for an F500 company, knows the hoops you have to jump through for things like compliance. There's a good chance the app did what it was supposed to just fine, but Delta couldn't sign on because it didn't have Reporting Requirements, SOC2 Compliant or a litany of other things that an Enterprise would require to sign on.
- wmeredith 5y ago
  This is a good point. I am currently consulting for a F100 healthcare company, and everything they do is driven by compliance. It's the first and last thing that gets talked about in almost every meeting.
- ksec 5y ago
  They could still have paid him the $100K as part of the R&D of the App.
  - noahmbarr 5y ago
    I would bet you $100 Delta offered that and more.
  - _fat_santa 5y ago
    I'm willing to bet they did offer him some $$ for the App. He probably asked for $X. Delta countered with $Y.They couldn't come to an agreement so conversations ended and Delta built the same kind of app in-house. Then the guy sues them.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

It's a fairly inflammatory headline and article, but it doesn't actually say very much. I suspect the story stretches out over a long time period, and has lots of variables. I can think of many ways that either side could be cast as villain or protagonist.

joelcollinsdc 5y ago

Is there any IP created because you generated a particular program / interface? Perhaps not the code itself but the end product? In the early stages of my career we were advised to never test out a competitors product for fears that we would inadventently copy something of theirs that was protected, but at my current company we compare our product to our competitors regularly. No risk there?

Jeff_Brown 5y ago
My question is similar -- what ideas are there to patent in a communications app? Isn't it just user profiles and messages?

richardwhiuk 5y ago

I wonder what the pilots contract said. If he was a software engineer, his contract would state that it belonged to his employer.

NegativeLatency 5y ago
Depends on the contract, many places I’ve worked if it’s outside of company time and on your own hardware you own it

alberth 5y ago

And in the tech world, this would be the property of the employer. News at 11.

overscore 5y ago
In some jurisdictions. Certainly not all.

duxup 5y ago

>carbon copy, knock-off of the role-based text messaging component of [his] proprietary QrewLive communications platform Not to say it isn't a good idea but the limited description seems like an idea that I imagine more than one person could have come up with. That's not to justify the company's actions, but if that is the app I'm not sure how novel a thing we're talking about here and maybe the needs that weren't met were simply back-end tech based and not idea based...? How many 'roughly the same idea but X' start ups are out there? and it's not always the first that succeeds.

breakfastduck 5y ago
It's not about whether more than one person could come up withe idea, it's that he pitched it to his own employer, met multiple times with execs to discuss acquisition, only for them to suddenly cut him off and directly copy what he proposed with no remuneration. That is not the same as two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something.
- giobox 5y ago
  No expert, and yes I agree it might be a sharp practice if they substantially lead him to believe they would deal with him, but is this not the purpose patents serve? The app as described in this article at least is incredibly generic - I'd imagine the Delta board members could independently arrive at the conclusion such software features would help and also determine that there may be other options to select that fit their operational requirements better. "Role based text messaging" sounds a lot like a workplace chat app...
  - josefx 5y ago
    Of course they could independently arrive at those ideas, they could independently try them out and see if they are worth it. But why invest what might end up a few hundred man hours in management meetings and trials when you can outsource it to some idiot who didn't even think about getting paid for the initial trial and error phase of the project. Don't talk to people unless you get paid for the time you invested, the guy behind AppGet had to learn that the hard way, as did hundreds of service companies that got used to outsource initial project planing without ever hearing back from their potential customers.