It's seems like these days it's getting a lot harder for me to find time to add to my blog. With Gwen Stefani's “What You Waiting For” blaring out of my headphones, I write this entry as I sit in an airport preparing to catch a flight to Northern California. You might be wondering what event takes me up to Sacramento? Well, I am going up there to attend the trial between the two founders of the Honda-Tech website, Dustin Adler and Mike DiCarlo. After almost a year and a half since the initial lawsuit was filed, this case will finally see the inside of a federal courtroom in the Eastern District of California.

The short version of the complaint filed is as follows: Dustin Adler alleges that he was a co-owner of RelyNet, and subsequently Honda-Tech. Dustin Adler is the owner of the copyrights for the ZeroForum software that powered Honda-Tech. DiCarlo “fires”Adler from RelyNet, and then eventually sells Honda-Tech for $2.6 million. Adler is claiming DiCarlo willfully infringed on his copyrights and is seeking damages.

The history can be summarized as follows: When Adler and DiCarlo, two best friends since the second grade, started Honda-Tech, they did so as a hobby (both were employed by various technology companies at the time). They found out that Honda-Acura.Net was losing its hosting capabilities so together they decided to start Honda-Tech.com to provide Honda tuning enthusiasts with a place where they could continue to gather online. Adler took it upon himself to write new message forum software to power Honda-Tech because the UBB software they were using (for the first few months) kept crashing. After writing the Zeroforum software, the two friends believed that they could try and make a business out of selling Adler's ZeroForum software as a “hosted” message forum solution.

They decided to launch this new business at Adler's website, ZeroForum.com. From a convenience standpoint, Adler and Dicarlo opted to run the finances and business side of the relationship under the RelyNet name. RelyNet was a company that DiCarlo started when he was in high school but never did anything with. They used RelyNet because it was already set up and DiCarlo and Adler had already been involved together in attempting to turn the RelyNet business into something of value.

Adler alleges that it was an equal partnership with him bringing in the ZeroForum software and DiCarlo bringing the company name. Their roles within RelyNet were distinct as well, with Adler functioning primarily in a technical capacity and DiCarlo taking a general business and administrative role. There was no formal paperwork documenting the business relationship between these two best friends. In 2002, as the RelyNet/Honda-Tech experiment started to make a little money, DiCarlo and Adler decided to incorporate RelyNet, however, DiCarlo incorporated with himself as sole shareholder. To make a long story short, over the next two years Adler continually asked DiCarlo to issue him his promised shares, with DiCarlo continually procrastinating and citing various reasons why he could not issue Adler his shares. Finally, in August of 2005, Adler arrived at work to find himself locked out and met by a sheriff to escort him off the premises.

Later, DiCarlo would sell Honda-Tech for $2.6 million with none of the proceeds going to Adler.

I guess we'll find out the final outcome of this dispute soon enough.

I will try to update the Honda community on some of the publicly available details and documents.

To read the complaint, click on the following link:

[redacted for the moment]