Fitness fracas: Jawbone accuses Fitbit staff of stealing over 330k of its secret files

The legal battle between the two competitors started in May 2015, when Jawbone sued Fitbit for hiring over five of its employees. Jawbone insisted that poached workers had stolen corporate files containing proprietary information and that Fitbit, its primary competitor, used that data to its advantage.

Jawbone claims the Fitbit Alta wristband “bears a striking resemblance to Jawbone’s UP products,” as stated in their complaint filed on Monday.

“As numerous experts in the wearable space have already remarked, Fitbit’s new ‘Alta’ product bears a striking resemblance to Jawbone’s UP products – not only in appearance and design but also in terms of its features,” Jawbone’s complaint reads, according to TechCrunch.“FitBit has recently begun to offer automatic activity detection on its products, which is a staple of Jawbone’s leading technology.”

Under a California Superior Court order, Fitbit employees appropriated over 18,000 Jawbone files. Now, however, the company claims that its forensic analysis revealed 335,191 additional files that contained information about Jawbone.

Jawbone’s case is that Fitbit and its staff lied in court when they said they had returned all files.  

Jawbone believes that a sixth former employee, Jing Qi Weiden, who now works for Fitbit, emailed sensitive files to her Fitbit email account after she was hired.

According to Jawbone, she had “precise confidential information and trade secrets developed by Jawbone that Fitbit sought to obtain,” such as prototypes of unreleased fitness trackers and mechanical designs. Jawbone is seeking a judge’s ruling to include Weiden in the lawsuit as well.

In September, Fitbit responded to Jawbone’s lawsuit with one of its own, filing a patent suit that covered five different UP devices, software and user interface.