Ontario court ruling reveals the real cost of vague job scopes and missing IP clauses
A senior software developer secretly built a competing product for approximately two years while being paid the same salary as before. When his employer sued to claim copyright ownership, it lost. On March 19, 2026, Justice Monahan of the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld that result: what an employer can direct an employee to do is not the same as what it actually did.
Vladimir Krougly was a senior developer at Nexus Solutions Inc., a London, Ont., software company. His assigned responsibility was to write source code for CEMView, a continuous emissions monitoring system used by heavy industry. He had no mandate to independently develop new software products.
By late 2008 or early 2009, while still employed full-time at Nexus, Krougly began secretly developing Limedas, short for "Live Measurement Data Acquisition System." Limedas performed similar functions to CEMView but had different source code, algorithms, and a more advanced communication protocol. The bulk of the work was done outside normal business hours and without Nexus property.
Krougly resigned effective January 4, 2011, and attempted to market Limedas commercially, including to some of Nexus's own customers. Nexus sued, arguing copyright belonged to the company because Krougly had created the software "in the course of" his employment.
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