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17 January 2020PatentsSarah Morgan

Bloomberg defeats AI company’s trade secret suit

In a victory for financial and media company Bloomberg, a US judge has dismissed the remainder of a lawsuit brought by artificial intelligence (AI) firm iSentium over an investment analysis tool.

Yesterday, January 16, District Judge Kevin Castel of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the remnants of the claim which had accused Bloomberg of misappropriating trade secrets in developing its own application for analysing social media posts.

The two parties had entered into an agreement in 2013, in which the iSentium’s technology was incorporated into the Bloomberg Terminal, a system that allows financial services professionals to analyse real-time market data.

But, by 2016, the parties terminated the relationship and Bloomberg began to develop its own sentiment-analysis technology.

One year later, in October 2017, iSentium sued Bloomberg for patent infringement and trade secrets misappropriation.

But, in the first success for Bloomberg, Castel granted the financial company’s motion to have the patent claims thrown out, after finding that iSentium’s patent (US number 8,856,056) didn’t describe eligible subject matter.

However, one month later, Castel concluded that Bloomberg would need to face the trade secrets accusations after the company failed to convince the New York court to dismiss the claims.

Bloomberg’s argument that iSentium had failed to adequately identify the trade secrets at issue was rejected by the court, with Castel concluding that the allegations describing iSentium’s purported trade secrets were broad but sufficient enough to give Bloomberg notice of the claim asserted against it.

Castel yesterday granted summary judgment to Bloomberg on the trade secrets misappropriation and breach of contract claims brought by iSentium.

Bloomberg had claimed that iSentium would have known that its trade secrets had been misappropriated by Bloomberg as early as July 2016, when Bloomberg issued a press release describing its own sentiment-analysis application. However, iSentium waited until October 2017 to bring its action.

Castel concluded that, under the developer agreement signed by both parties which stated that claims were subject to a one-year limitations period, iSentium had waited too long to sue.

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More on this story

Patents
30 October 2018   Financial and media company Bloomberg has prevailed against artificial intelligence company iSentium in a patent dispute over social media technology.
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21 November 2018   A US judge ruled that Bloomberg must face trade secret accusations late last week, after the financial and media company failed to convince the court to dismiss the claims of trade secret misappropriation.
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1 October 2020   Bloomberg Finance has agreed to settle a lawsuit against UBS over claims the Swiss investment bank misused proprietary financial data.