MORNINGSTAR ACCUSED OF ONLINE ESPIONAGE
NEW YORK – Research firm Morningstar Inc. has been named in a lawsuit for allegedly gaining unauthorized access to a Web-based service that helps clients send the most up-to-date mutual fund prospectuses to investors. The lawsuit, which was filed by NewRiver Inc., seeks to stop Morningstar from accessing the company’s online warehouse of updated prospectuses, and asks for unspecified trebled damages.
NewRiver is accusing Morningstar of using “screen-scraping” technology and copying thousands of documents. “We think the lawsuit has one purpose: to discourage Morningstar from competing with NewRiver… We did not use any NewRiver technology, data or information to create or market our product. We did not access the data through password-protected sites,” said a spokeswoman for Morningstar, which launched the company’s own service in late 2008. Morningstar acknowledged accessing NewRiver's data for “benchmarking” purposes to see if the company’s own information was up to date. NewRiver's service, for which the company obtained a patent in 1998, checks the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission's online EDGAR site for updates to prospectuses and stores them on its electronic repository for use by brokerage houses. NewRiver handles about 1,000 prospectus updates every night and clients pay up to $500,000 per year for a subscription.
