District Court Awards Judgment to ITC in Case Against Suzhou Gstarsoft

The IntelliCAD Technology Consortium (ITC) reported that it has been awarded a $273,892.14 judgment against former ITC member Suzhou Gstarsoft, the developer of GstarCAD, in a lawsuit ITC filed last year. A PDF of the U.S. District Court ruling and the award is available on the ITC website. 

In its initial iterations, GstarCAD — which was launched in 2009 — incorporated ITC technology. (Commercial members of the ITC pay licensing fees to the consortium for access to IntelliCAD source code and the right to develop and sell products based on the IntelliCAD technology.) 

Gstarsoft parted ways with the organization with the release of GstarCAD8 in 2013, which the company said was built on a new architecture. ITC did not agree that the new release was free of IntelliCAD code, and in May 2015, the consortium filed a lawsuit alleging a breach of the commercial membership agreement, including nonpayment of membership fees, noncompliance with auditing requirements, and failure to comply with membership rules. Ralph Grabowski reported that GstarCAD objected to the proposed audit approach for fear of damaging its reputation within China and endangering its intellectual property.

The current judgment includes an order compelling Gstarsoft to undergo an audit of its CAD platform in order to determine whether it contains IntelliCAD code. The ITC has also reserved the right to bring additional claims against Gstar, including — but not limited to — copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. The ITC "will continue to aggressively protect the intellectual property of the consortium from illegal use or any illegal attempt to create derivative products from the IntelliCAD source code," the consortium stated in a release issued on Friday.