On the eve of its inaugural Adobe Acrobat PDF Central Conference, Technology Education Solutions last week shut down its Ultimate PDF forms service after FormRouter, a competitor in Cary, N.C., obtained a temporary restraining order against Tech Ed.On the eve of its inaugural Adobe Acrobat
PDF Central Conference—set for Nov. 6-9 at the Mid America Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa—Technology Education Solutions last week shut down its Ultimate PDF forms service after
FormRouter, a competitor in Cary, N.C., obtained a temporary restraining order against Tech Ed.
The action will not affect the conference in any way, says Tech Ed founder and CEO Stacey Sell, whose company is based in Lincoln, NE.
The two companies have competing services that simplify the collection of data via PDF forms for the benefit of users who don't have deep technical backgrounds or time to set up the necessary database back end. Tech Ed was enrolled in FormRouter's VAR program from April 2005 to March 2006.
Last Thursday, Wake County (N.C.) Superior Court judge Narley L. Cashwell signed the order, stating that FormRouter showed a "substantial likelihood of success" of winning a lawsuit filed October 20. The complaint came with attachments showing emails between the two companies, screen shot from both companies' Web sites, and extensive explanation of the complicated (to laypeople) issue of PDF forms and how the two companies fit into the market.
"From our vantage point . . . you hope these things never come up," FormRouter CEO Chris Pieper told PDFZone. "But parties do differ, and we believe strongly enough that we felt this was an important thing to defend. Hopefully it will get resolved soon enough."
FormRouter's suit alleges that Tech Ed illegally copied FormRouter's PDF forms service using proprietary information acquired while Tech Ed was a member of the FormRouter VAR program. In addition to the temporary restraining order, FormRouter's suit seeks temporary and permanent injunctions against Ultimate PDF as well as compensation for loss of business and punitive damages.
For its part, Tech Ed claims in court documents that Ultimate PDF was developed by an independent consultant who Tech Ed never showed FormRouter forms or supporting documentation. Ultimate PDF was developed with activePDF PDF Toolkit, a product Tech Ed licenses to host the service.
A crucial difference between Ultimate PDF and FormRouter, Sell said in court documents, is that FormRouter's service requires its customers to route company data through FormRouter servers. Ultimate PDF can work that way, too—but Tech Ed also offers its clients server setups so they can manage their form data internally.
Among the many ways FormRouter claims that Tech Ed mimicked its service—down to animated characters in tutorials—it says that Tech Ed used FormRouter's proprietary naming conventions for certain hidden form fields in Ultimate PDF that, among other things, email forms data. In response to those allegations, Tech Ed employee Nicole Sell said in court documents that her company used "industry standard" field names.
It's possible, Nicole Sell went on, that some field names—left over from when Tech Ed had previously used the FormRouter service internally for recordkeeping in its training seminars—unintentionally got copied over to forms later used with Ultimate PDF customers.
In a statement on its Web site, FormRouter said it learned of the Ultimate PDF service when company representatives contacted Tech Ed requesting to participate in the conference, a request it says Tech Ed refused. Tech Ed acknowledges this in court documents, pointing out that FormRouter representatives would be permitted to attend the show.
A hearing for a preliminary injunction against Tech Ed will take place in North Carolina on Nov. 6, the opening day of the Iowa PDF Central Conference. Stacey Sell says that the legal actions won't affect the PDF Central show.
"There's absolutely no effect on the conference itself, because Tech Ed is an Adobe Training Partner," she tells PDFzone. "Our primary business is Adobe and Microsoft training. . . . Our seminars are educational seminars, not a sales seminar."
References to Ultimate PDF were gone from the Tech Ed website by Monday, a check by PDFzone confirmed.
