A Riga City Court rejected a lawsuit filed by OnAir Entertainment’s parent company against a former employee on 18 October.
A Riga City Court rejected a lawsuit filed by OnAir Entertainment’s parent company against a former employee on 18 October.
RealTime SIA, a live casino supplier operating under the OnAir Entertainment brand, sought damages of €10,800 after Ivan Ivanovs, a former IT project manager, posted on LinkedIn about his achievements during his two-year tenure with the company.
The post, which OnAir argued disclosed trade secrets, detailed his work on various roulette games, including versions developed for US markets in New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
The company argued that Ivanovs’ post revealed confidential business strategies and project details that could benefit competitors.
However, Judge Mikulane found in their verdict, which can be appealed within 20 days, that the information shared by Ivanovs did not qualify as trade secrets under Latvian law.
The court determined that much of the information about the company’s US market plans had already been made public through various channels, including corporate announcements and industry news outlets.
The judge noted that OnAir Entertainment had publicly disclosed its plans to launch in regulated US states as early as October 2022, months before Ivanovs’ post.
Ivanovs claims suit is retaliatory
In his defence, Ivanovs claimed the lawsuit was retaliatory, following his 2023 complaint to the State Labour Inspectorate about denied annual leave entitlements.
He argued that the information he shared was necessary to demonstrate his professional experience to potential employers.
The court’s ruling emphasised that companies cannot broadly classify all workplace information as trade secrets, particularly when it pertains to an employee’s acquired work experience and skills.
The judge also found that the game titles and features mentioned in Ivanovs’ post were already publicly available information, accessible through various gaming websites and regulatory documents.
Ivanovs is best known as the whistleblower who claimed OnAir was accessing an internal environment at Playtech, its competitor in the live casino space.
This, which is unrelated to the company’s case against Ivanovs, resulted in Playtech filing infringement proceedings in the UK High Court.
NEXT.io has contacted OnAir for comment.