* The score: Elena Ambrosiadou 2 – Martin Coward 0 *
Less than two years after a Limassol court upheld the island’s reputation as being safe for IP rights, a court in England has also found that the intellectual property of the high-speed trading software in question belongs to the company and thus, the co-author who abandoned the European hedge fund IKOS has no claim to the software.
The UK High Court handed down a decisive victory to IKOS against Martin Coward, a former director, by affirming the company’s ownership of its quantitative analysis software, and rejecting Coward’s claims to it, saying he had written a substantial part of it.
The court also ruled that Coward had no right to take copies of IKOS’ software, first developed to trade Japanese Equity Warrants in the 1990s. He has already admitted to covertly making a copy of the software in November 2009 which he then took to Monaco and other countries, and also uploaded to cloud storage. Cyprus and Monaco officials have launched criminal investigations into Coward’s actions and a number of his associates.
This outcome is a resounding success for IKOS and its CEO, Elena Ambrosiadou, who has long advocated improvements in European Intellectual Property protection laws.
“Our investors will be very pleased with this result because it secures the future of their investment with IKOS,” Ambrosiadou said after the ruling by Judge Asplin.
“In addition to confirming the ownership of the IP, this ruling vindicates IKOS’ defence of its lawful rights to IP and strengthens the case for an overhaul of the European laws regarding protection of Intellectual Property,” she added.
IP theft in the UK and other European countries are largely out of date in the era of global networks and cloud computing, and trail behind United States law where recent cases of trade secrets and theft have resulted in long jail sentences.
“Having in mind the vague and insufficient protection of copyright in the EU (there is no official copyright registration system, unlike in the U.S.), such rulings are very important for the protection of copyright,” said Sozos-Christos Theodoulou, M Law, D.E.A., Partner/Advocate at the Law Offices of Dr. Christos A. Theodoulou.
“Cypriot courts should follow in the same path, in order to enhance the feeling of intellectual security and, thus, encourage creativity among our compatriots,” Theodoulou added.
“This development strengthens and gives even more credibility to Cyprus’ attractive intellectual property regime, whereby 80% of the profits from the disposal and exploitation of the IP are treated as an expense and thus disregarded for tax purposes,” explained Efthymios Kanaris, Director at Kanaris, Demetriades & Associates in Nicosia.
Eralier this year, Vincent Pfister, the elusive IT expert charged with stealing software and data from IKOS, appeared in a Cyprus court to hear seven charges of theft and fraud filed by the state.
He had been evading the authorities since April last year when the police filed the charge sheet in Limassol District Court.
Limassol District Court Judge Yiota Kyprianides set the hearing date for May 21 and let Pfister free on a bail of 50,000 euros.
In a landmark case involving the protection of intellectual property rights that has shed light on the cloak-and-dagger intricacies of the high-speed trading world, Pfister has been charged with stealing proprietary software, source codes, data files, archives, as well as other information deemed confidential.
He was found to have stored the software and documents on a hard drive and later on a memory stick that was traced in a joint police sting involving officers in Cyprus, the U.K. and France.
In a related case, Pfister was accused of stealing the information in November 2009 with the intent of setting up a rival firm to IKOS in Monaco, which would be operated by Martin Coward.
