By-Buk Co. v. Printed Cellophane Tape Co.

Defendants appeal from a judgment enjoining them from using, assembling, or manufacturing certain machinery which was a trade secret of the plaintiff; ordering them to dismantle the machines assembled by them that embodied plaintiff’s trade secret and decreeing that the plaintiff is entitled to damages, both compensatory and punitive, to be fixed upon an accounting hereinafter to be had.

Prior to June of 1954 both the plaintiff and the defendants Gevirtz, doing business as copartners under the name of Printed Cellophane Tape Company, hereinafter called “Tape Company, ’ ’ had engaged in the business of manufacturing and selling pressure-sensitive adhesive tape for industrial uses.

In the spring of 1954 Homer G. Buck, one of the partners of plaintiff partnership, hereinafter called “Buck,” learned that a competitor, whose manufacturing operations were conducted in the eastern United States, was manufacturing and selling overlapping masking discs and die-cut masks of pressure-sensitive tape for use by manufacturers in masking certain parts of apparatus which they desired to shield from abrasives or paint. Desiring to produce a similar product Buck commenced experiments for the…