Four founders of online portal held for copyright infringement

Karachi

Four men, running an online portal updating investors about stocks, mutual funds, and commodities, were arrested on Wednesday over charges of copyright infringement.

The AMZ MAK Capital Ltd filed a complaint that its former employees, Baqar Abbas Jafri, Sennen D’Souza, Hammad Ali Hashmi, and Waqar Ehsan, were assigned the task of creating a platform for investors and they stole this code and came up with their own portal, “Investors Lounge”, with a few alterations.

The AMZ MAK Capital approached the Sindh High Court, following which an FIR was registered at the Darakhshan police station and a raid conducted at the offices of Investors Lounge in Sindhi Muslim Society.

In its complaint, the AMZ MAK Capital said the four founders of Investors Lounge were previously associated with The Nest I/O, a startup based in Karachi which had received funding from Google for entrepreneurs, Samsung as well as the US State Department.

The company said the four men were hired in 2013 and along with 16 other employees were assigned the task of developing a investors social media platform. The firm spent Rs14 million on developing the product

However, after the product was developed, the four employees, along with the head of software programming and project head, quit at the same time taking the source code along with them.

The mastermind behind this fraud, Baqar Abbas Jafri, re-launched the same website a few months later by changing a few interfaces while keeping the exact same idea and the source code.

The company said in a statement that the case would serve as a precedence and protect the rights of all would-be entrepreneurs in the future.

It added that not only did these four men re-launch the site as their own, they even approached the NEST-IO for incubation to change the interface and acquired further funding from, Arpatech, a tech-funding company.

Mir Mohammad Ali Khan, the CEO of AMZ MAK Capital, said he took the matter to court as he did not want the perpetrators to run away. “After hearing the merits of the case, the judge decided to issue arrest warrants,” he added.

“The source code is valued at $140,000 and a formal trial will now be held to determine the outcome of the case.”

The founders of Investors Lounge, however, denied these claims and said that they had created a new and original software code for their portal with the assistance of shared content recently purchased from recognised vendors with the specific intention of using such shared content for their project only.

Jehan Ara, the head of Nest I/O, said the case was totally without any merit. “This is a false accusation,” she added.

“I know these youngsters personally and the product was created from scratch. It is heartbreaking and totally unjust that these young entrepreneurs who have struggled so much and worked so hard to get to this stage should be put through this. I stand by them.”