Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
An alternative defence springs to mind. If they could show that the nook development team were completely unaware of the discussions, and had no contact with anyone who'd seen the NDAed material, they be OK. But that's a much tougher challenge.
|
If the nook was developed by an outside firm, they might be able to show "clean room" conditions. B&N execs would have been pretty foolish to get into an NDA discussion with a potentially competing model otherwise. But if the design was in the hands of an outside firm, they might have been hedging their bets to talk with Spring as well. Maybe the design process had hit a snag at that point, or maybe the execs had heard that Spring was working on similar lines and wanted to check them out for a possible second version. Who knows?
Looks to me like the cleanest solution would be for B&N to buy or license the Alex from Spring and market it as nook++, and claim that had been their intent all along.
