Four entrepreneurs arrested in Karachi for alleged copyright infringement

KARACHI: Four members of a startup formerly contrived at Google-backed The Nest I/O have been arrested for infringing on intellectual property rights.

The brainchild of these entrepreneurs, Investors Lounge, a portal for budding investors to see updated financial data on things like stocks, mutual funds, and commodities recently secured its first round of funding.

The four individuals – Baqar Abbas Jafri, Sennen D’Souza, Hammad Ali Hashmi, and Waqar Ehsan – were previously associated with The Nest I/O, a startup based in Karachi which has received funding from Google for Entrepreneurs, Samsung as well as the US State Department.

The employers at AMZ MAK have launched a complaint stating that the founders of Investors lounge were former employees; “they were assigned a task of creating a platform for investors that is where they allegedly stole this code from and built their own product with only a few alterations”.

“After the product was developed, all the above named four employees, along with the head of software programming and project head, quit at the same time taking the source code along with them,” says a statement from the complainant provided to Tech in Asia.

“The mastermind behind this fraud, Baqar Abbas Jafri, re-launched the same website few months later, which was the idea and property of AMZ MAK Capital, by changing a few interfaces while keeping the exact same idea and the source code.”

Mir Mohammad Ali Khan, the CEO of AMZ MAK Capital, said he took the case to court as he didn’t want the perpetrators to run away. After hearing the merits of the case, the judge decided to issue arrest warrants.

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

The founders of Investors lounge however denied all such claims and said that they, “created new and original software code for Investors Lounge portal with the assistance of shared content recently purchased from recognized vendors with the specific intention of using such shared content for Investors Lounge only”.

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

“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.”

— File photo by Reuters