Comtech Telecommunications Corp. v. Eusebia, Ltd.

Background

Plaintiffs Comtech Telecommunications Corp. and TeleCommunication Systems, Inc. sought permission to publicly file two agreements while redacting limited information. The agreements were the Virtumedix Provider Partner Agreement dated May 24, 2015, and the Virtumedix API License Agreement dated August 31, 2017. The plaintiffs renewed the request after the court had denied an earlier sealing request without prejudice.

Requested Redactions

The plaintiffs proposed redacting amounts for two fees in the Provider Partner Agreement that they said were not among the fees at issue in their damages claims. They also proposed redacting the application programming interface specifications in the API License. The plaintiffs argued that the specifications were confidential proprietary information, had been protected through confidentiality markings, contractual restrictions, and limited access, and could be used to reverse-engineer their software.

The plaintiffs argued that information directly related to the court’s consideration of their motion for default judgment should remain public, while immaterial information and the API specifications could be redacted. They cited the strong presumption of public access to judicial documents and argued that the proposed redactions were narrowly limited.

Ruling

Judge Ronnie Abrams granted the application. The court permitted the plaintiffs to file the two licenses with the redactions they proposed. The order did not separately explain the court’s reasoning beyond granting the application.