Trust Safe Pay, LLC v. Dynamic Diet, LLC et al. (17-cv-10166).

Trust Safe alleges that the defendants misappropriated proprietary information relating to its diet product business and opened a competing company, Dynamic Diet, and that they copied portions of Trust Safe 2019s website without authorization. Trust Safe 2019s original complaint was dismissed without prejudice after Magistrate Judge Kelley determined that it failed to meet the Twombly pleading standards, laying out specific deficiencies in the pleadings and allowing Trust Safe the opportunity to amend its complaint. The new complaint again failed to properly plead ownership and pre-registration of a copyright registration as required by Federal copyright law. Instead, Trust Safe again failed to plead that it had submitted a complete application, along with the fees and deposit copy, to the Copyright Office, and failed to plead that it took any action prior to the filing of the lawsuit. While under First Circuit law an application is deemed to meet the preregistration requirement when it is received by the Copyright Office, an incomplete application cannot satisfy the preregistration requirement. Here, not only was the completeness of the deposit pled, the documents attached to the complaint suggested that the deposit was not complete as of the filing of the original complaint. I would note without comment that among the documents submitted there was reference to submitting the copyright applications via Legal Zoom, a dubious proposition where litigation is anticipated. Judge Kelley also found that the complaint failed to allege which elements of the website were actually subject to copyright protection, making it impossible to analyze whether the defendants copied protected material. Given that this was the second failed attempt to properly plead infringement, Judge Kelley dismissed the copyright claim with prejudice. She further dismissed the claims for trade secret misappropriation, fraud, and unfair and deceptive business practices without prejudice, declining to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the state law claims with the sole federal claim having been dismissed.