Jeb Bush- (possible) Thief!!! Not surprising since his wife is a SMUGGLER and daughter is a drug addict and forger, who impersonates DOCTORS.
Company accuses state of stealing e-budget idea
By John Kennedy Chief | Tallahassee Bureau
Posted June 3, 2002
TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Jeb Bush is running for re-election as the state's "education governor," even as Democratic rivals and teachers groups condemn his school-funding record.
Now another of the Republican governor's self-proclaimed titles is under attack -- his claim to being Florida's first "e-governor," as adept at surfing the Internet as he is on the campaign trail.
In a lawsuit filed in Tallahassee, two businesswomen say the Bush administration stole their idea for creating a user-friendly state budget that could be accessed on the Web.
Keystrokes, program features and the entire concept for placing the phonebook-sized state budget on the Internet were pilfered during meetings the women had with state officials, the suit contends.
The women say they are victims of intellectual-property theft, conducted by the governor's budget director in concert with top House and Senate budget officials.
"All they did was pick our brains for two years and then designed their own system," said Anna Mattson, a former longtime state budget systems expert whose company, GroupThink, has filed the suit in Leon County Circuit Court.
"They just weren't going to let two little old ladies make any money off them," she added.
Representing Mattson, business partner Sherri Taylor and their start-up company is Willie Gary's South Florida law firm.
Gary is considered a giant-slayer in the thorny field of intellectual-property law. The firm won a $240 million jury award two years ago for two businessmen who claimed the Walt Disney Co. stole their idea for its Wide World of Sports complex -- a case on appeal.
Bush is not a defendant in the new lawsuit. But those accused of stealing GroupThink's system include his budget director, Donna Arduin, along with House budget director David Coburn and his Senate counterpart, Elton Revell. The state of Florida, House Speaker Tom Feeney and Senate President John McKay also are named.
Mattson and Taylor say their lawsuit shows state officials willing to run roughshod over a small company that had developed a product that opened the state's budget process to lawmakers and the public like never before.
The state, of course, sees it differently.
"We are confident that when people know the facts, the lawsuit will be dismissed," said Katie Muniz, a Bush spokeswoman. She referred questions to the Attorney General's Office, which is defending the state.
"This case is all about timing," said Denis Dean, an assistant attorney general. "As soon as the new governor came into office, he wanted to develop an e-budget. Our position is that we were working on an e-budget all along."
A point of pride
While Bush's education initiatives have emerged as a central part of his re-election campaign -- and the focus of attacks from his opponents -- the governor's drive to modernize the state's budget process has drawn less attention.
Still, it's a point of pride for the governor. Bush made history in January 2000 when he released his budget recommendations in computerized format, an "electronic budget" available on the Internet at www.flgov.com.
For Mattson and Taylor, that day marked a turning point for their company, which had hoped to use the Florida budget as a springboard to marketing Web-based budget information in other states. Now the company is struggling to stay alive.
U.S. Supreme Court rulings have tended to favor states in federal cases involving lawsuits by private companies alleging intellectual-property theft. Suits have been dismissed or the amount of damage awards capped by a state's sovereign immunity.
But legal fights over trade secrets, such as GroupThink's claim, are a matter of state law.
"If the Florida officials can pull out a memo that says they were already working on this, that might do it," said Keith Kupferschmid, an intellectual-property expert with the national Software and Information Industry Association.
According to the lawsuit, the concept of an "e-budget" began when the two women filed a public-records request in November 1998 for budget documents they later used to develop a Web site that tracked state technology-related issues and purchases. They sold the information to clients.
Over the next few months, Mattson and Taylor refined their product, adding budget details from the hard-to-obtain "working papers" of state agencies. This allowed users to track individual spending items down to the dollar.
The pair demonstrated their product to staffers of the governor's budget office in June 1999. By late summer, GroupThink also had registered a federal copyright for its "State Budget Information Network." The women hoped to build the system for the governor's office for $1.8 million, a relatively modest sum for state government but significant for the fledgling company.
Meeting with budget chief
By October, a meeting was arranged with budget director Arduin, who was shown how to track budget items with a computer mouse.
"I can still remember moving aside and letting Donna use the laptop," said Taylor, also a former government computer systems designer. "She would click and 'drill down' into the budget and say, 'Oh, cool.' We knew that what we had was pretty unique."
The term "drill down" was introduced to state officials by GroupThink, the lawsuit contends. The women say that a board member in a conference room used by budget officials once reminded them not to use that term "in describing our prototype . . . or we could be sued."
Dean, the assistant attorney general, says use of the term does not prove a conspiracy.
"We've come up with 20 or 30 citations alone in our research that mention the term 'drilling down,'" Dean said. "There's no way that anyone could claim trademark authority over that term.
"They basically obtained public records, worked with them, and then tried to sell them back to the state," he said.
After that October meeting, Arduin asked the women to contact Roy Cales, director of the governor's technology office. Cales, who resigned last summer after his arrest on unrelated forgery and theft charges, was brought in so he would "have the necessary information to misappropriate the GroupThink product," the lawsuit claims.
When Bush unveiled a relatively basic e-budget in January 2000, Mattson and Taylor were concerned by its similarity to their more sweeping State Budget Information Network.
They thought they still had a superior product, so they turned to the House of Representatives as a potential client.
"I remember meeting with them," said then-House Speaker John Thrasher, R-Orange Park, now a capital lobbyist. "Their system seemed to have a lot of good qualities to it."
Mattson and Taylor say that Thrasher, Feeney and other House leaders signed a three-year, $200,000 annual contract that March for access to GroupThink's Web budget.
GroupThink says that Arduin urged against the purchase, telling Thrasher she was building a similar system he could use. At the same time, McKay, the incoming Senate president, also began talking with Mattson about developing a system for the Senate.
Over the next few months, though, relations soured.
In late October 2000, Mattson and Taylor attended a demonstration of a new and improved version of the governor's e-budget, scheduled for release the following January. The lawsuit said they were "stunned by the similarities," including the name -- Florida Budget Information System.
Shortly after Bush released his second e-budget, the House told GroupThink it was canceling its contract.
After nearly two years of off-and-on negotiations, the company and state officials will meet next in court.
"It's all going to come down to which side has the better documentation of what they were doing," Kupferschmid said. |
