• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, June 11, 2013

Two years after being sued by TRA Global for patent infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets and other charges related to TRA’s proprietary research service that matches TV viewing with consumer purchase patterns, WPP research companies Kantar and TNS have asked a New York court to summarily dismiss the case before it goes to trial.

The WPP companies argued in their brief, filed last week with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, that TRA has come up with no evidence after two years of what it termed “aggressive discovery” to justify continuing the case.

The legal dispute began in mid-2011 shortly after Kantar launched a competing service to TRA’s called RapidView. Kantar launched RapidView in spring 2011, just a few months after talks between the parties considering a potential purchase of the TRA offering by WPP broke off.

Early on in the dispute, the parties were ordered to the mediation table by the judge overseeing the case—U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin. But those talks proved fruitless, and the case continued to wind its way through the courts.

In September 2011, TRA lost a motion for a preliminary injunction that would have barred Kantar from offering the RapidView service until the court case was resolved. Various stages of discovery have been ongoing since then. Last summer, TRA was acquired by TiVo.

“TRA is in no better position” now than it was when its bid for preliminary injunction was denied, Kantar argued in its motion-for-dismissal papers. The WPP company argued that it “independently developed [RapidView] based on its analogous ‘single-source’ product in the U.K. that pre-dated TRA’s very existence and that TRA’s co-founder has admitted was the world’s ‘first’ such product.”

Kantar also argued that TRA has offered no evidence that it “used any asserted trade secret … By failing to offer any expert analysis of use, TRA has not only failed to meet its burden but has broken its promise to the Court to ‘provide an expert report explaining how plaintiffs ‘used' TRA’s trade secrets.”

TRA has not yet replied to the motion to dismiss. Judge Scheindlin hasn’t ruled on the merits of the Kantar motion but did rule that it contains some procedural violations that Kantar has to clean up by the end of the week. Otherwise, the motion will be tossed, Scheindlin ruled.

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