Computer Care v. Service Systems Enterprises

Citation
982 F.2d 1063 (full-text)

Synopsis
Plaintiff Computer Care is a company that works with car companies and other service oriented businesses dealing with cars such as oil change shops and repair shops. Plaintiff generates letters that are sent out, to their clients coustomers, every month to remind said customers when they need to bring in their cars for repair or maintainence, as well as; reports to the car companies about the success of their venture. When Plaintiff entered the market in Chicago in June of 1989, it hired Timothy Riordan and Patrick O'Rourke as salesman for the area. Mr. Riordan told the soon to be president and vice president of defendant Service Systems Enterprises inc. all about plaintiff's business. He disclosed, "copies of Computer Care's sample reminder letter, its sales brochures, its computer-generated monthly reports, its sales presentation book and other materials that Computer Care sales representatives make available to customers." Plaintiff sued defendant for missappropriation of its trade dress, misleading advertising and missappropriation of its trade secrets.

Holding
The court of appeals held as to the trade dress arguement that, the lower court was correct in determining that there was no trade dress violation becuase, plaintiff's trade dress was 1) distinctive 2) likely to cause confusion as between the two products and 3) was not funtional.

Regarding the Misleading advertising the court found that an injunction should have been issued, especially considering the lower courts finding that the misleading advertising claim was actionable, but its lack of any relief for plaintiff, without reason, limited the courts ability to review. The court remanded this claim for further consideration by the lower court.

As for the trade secret violation, the court held that there was no protectable trade secret and as such there could be no violation. The court held that the use of multiple triggers for when a car needed maintainence as not a protectable secret. The court held that even if the types of triggers could be deemed a trade secret there was insufficient proof of their existance for the lower court to issue a prliminary injunction. Further, the rulling of the lower court protected not just plaintiff's specific twelve triggers but any type of system with more than one trigger, and the court of appeals held that this was not a valid trade secret.

Further the court held that the use of adjustable service cycles was not a novel idea, and even had it been, it would loose any guise of protection once a coustomer requested that notifications be sent out on an altered timeline.

Finally, the court also held that tracking cars other than by their liscence or vin number was not a missappropriation of a trade secret, neither was the issuance of a second reminder letter, or the removal of nonresponsive recipients from its mailing list. The court held that all of these individual features on their own or in conjunction were not sufficiently complex as to prevent replication based on publicly available knowledge. As such the court held that there was no trade secret and thus no way to missappropriate it.