On May 20, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated and remanded a district court’s ruling in the matter of Compulife Software, Inc. v. Newman et al, finding that while publicly available life insurance quotes are not a protectable trade secret, scraping enough of them from an online database to derive the formula used to determine the quotes could amount to misappropriation of an underlying trade secret.
The trade secret misappropriation dispute began in December 2016, when Compulife Software alleged that Moses Newman et al employed a hacker to scrape term life insurance quote data from the company’s “Transformative Database” to develop a competing product.
