The High Court in London has ordered Piksel has been ordered to hand over source code to VOD delivery provider FilmFlex.
The company, owned since May 2014 by the US firm Vubiquity Inc, used software provided by the former Ioko to both deliver content and interface with the billing systems of its customers. These include Virgin Media, TalkTalk, 4oD and EE.
Vubiquity said it couldn’t run its business thoroughly without access to the source codes.
Professor Wolfgang Emmerich, Professor of Distributed Computing at University College, London told the court that the only commercially realistic way to carry out the acts that FilmFlex was licensed to do with the software was by modifying the source code and then compiling it into object code.
FilmFlex was also seeking damages for breach of contract from Piksel due to its failure to hand over the source code.
The two companies had worked together on the implementation of the software and Mrs Justice Rose DBE, presiding, said FilmFlex was entitled to the rights under the licensing agreement.
She told Piksel to pass a copy of the software to FilmFlex either by memory stick or disk or through an email.
