Case No. IP-2018-000134

113.On 28 February 2017 Mr Bishop resigned from Trailfinders. On 1 March 2017 he signed a franchise agreement with TCL. By an email to Abigail Hamer of TCL dated 4 May 2017 Mr Bishop sent TCL his contacts list. 114.Mr Bishop’s potential liability in respect of his accessing Viewtrail after he left Trailfinders is the same as Mr La Gette’s. He took information concerning 32 clients. He said that he had obtained permission from 23 of them. I accept that if he obtained permission from a client before he accessed their information on their behalf, the taking and using of that information was licensed by Trailfinders and could give rise to no liability on the part of Mr Bishop. There was no written evidence of permission from any of the 23 clients in question. Mr Bishop said that this was because the permission was always given in unrecorded phone calls. But in cross-examination Mr Bishop, understandably, had only a vague recollection of what clients had said in all these phone calls and at one point he admitted that he had not had permission in the majority of cases. I was not convinced that his conversations with former clients went further than informing them that he had left Trailfinders and raising the possibility that they might nonetheless wish to continue using Mr Bishop for booking holidays or other trips in the future. I find on the balance of probabilities that Mr Bishop was not on any occasion given permission by a client to access information about them from Viewtrail. 115.The other undisputed allegation against Mr Bishop was that he compiled his contact book of client information while he was still at Trailfinders and that the majority of this information came from Superfacts. Mr Bishop offered two reasons why he was entitled to do this. The first was that he made no secret of it. Yet he admitted that he had not told anyone that he was doing this. I do not accept the implied suggestion that his compilation of his contact book was sanctioned by Trailfinders. Secondly, Mr Bishop said that the information taken from Superfacts was available from public sources. For the same reasons I have given in relation to Mr La Gette, this does not afford a defence. 116.I find that Mr Bishop was in breach of an implied term in his contract of employment not to use or disclose information confidential to Trailfinders and that he acted in breach of that term when he compiled his contact book. He was also in breach of an equitable obligation of confidence to Trailfinders. See also art.4(2) of Directive 2016/943. 117.Mr Bishop was further in breach of his equitable obligation when he accessed Viewtrail after he left Trailfinders and obtained and used information about 32 of his former clients. See also art.4(2) and (3) of Directive 2016/943.