An ex-employee has accused the Chika Nwobi led L5 Lab of cybersquatting and Copyright infringement. Excerpts of the the story follows:
“A former employee of L5 Labs has told TechCabal that the startup incubator is using tough tactics that infringe his intellectual property rights in a bid to further their own venture, after declining to invest in his.
The individual, Tolulope Oladimeji, says that while he was in the employ of L5 Labs, he had approached the managers with an idea for a video curation website with a view to securing investment to fund its execution.
Tolulope registered the domain “wawo.tv” in 2013, and had created a Devour.com-like website that aggregates and categorises videos from YouTube.
In his account, Tolulope pitched wawo.tv to L5 Labs early in 2014, along with business model propositions and distribution strategies that would be uniquely suited to L5 Labs’ strong connections to telcos and other strategic media players via its affiliate VAS concerns. L5 Labs declined to invest.
In October, Tolulope left L5 Labs for Interswitch. On the 10th of November, L5 Labs got in touch to say they liked the wawo.tv domain and wanted to buy it off him. The negotiations, led by Emmanuel Malaka, stalled when Tolulope rejected their offer to acquire wawo.tv for the sum of N50,000.
Tolulope says that soon after, he learned from one of the managers that L5 Labs had gone on to acquire domain names that are more or less identical to wawo.tv. The domains that he discovered are wawotv.com, wawotv.net and wawotv.org.”
Tech Cabal has the full story.