A Jersey business and its agent have been fined for contempt of court in a case that resulted in a landmark ruling that employees can't copy email databases to take with them when they leave for a new job.
Christopher Inns, an ex-employee of Jersey-based recruitment agency Nautech Services, and CSS, which is owned by Kevin Gollop, have each been fined £2,500 for breaching an interim injunction that prevented them from using both confidential information and information that was subject to Nautech's copyright.
Collas Crill partner Elena Moran, who represented Nautech, said: "Fines for contempt of court are reasonably rare in commercial cases such as this, and this result serves as further warning to employees that they have no right to take information with them when they leave a job."
In its landmark judgment in August, Jersey's Royal Court found that contact information stored in Microsoft Outlook Contacts can be protected by the law of confidentiality even where the individual contact details are available on the internet or on social media sites. The case also highlighted the need to take care over the ownership of information contained in LinkedIn accounts.
Nautech believed an interim injunction from 2013 was being breached by Mr Inns and CSS in that Mr Inns, while working as an agent for CSS, was continuing to use copied data. Mr Inns, Mr Gollop and other respondents argued that the names and email addresses of contractors stored in Nautech's Microsoft Outlook Contacts were not confidential because contractors can be contacted by a variety of other means including social media, advertisements and online job forums, and as the information was easy to obtain it could not be confidential.
The Court rejected this and found that the database of contacts was at the heart of Nautech's business and that there was no publicly available 'directory'.
In a judgment handed down on 25 November 2014, the Royal Court accepted apologies from Mr Inns and Mr Gollop, on behalf of CSS, that they had breached the interim injunction by continuing to use copied data, but did not agree that the breaches were the result of a genuine mistake. As a result it believed a penalty must be imposed and ordered each of Mr Inns and CSS to pay a fine of £2,500.