WebProNews

A Santa Clara County court has found in favor of Yahoo in allowing a dozen former engineers for Nuance to begin working for the portal company.

Nuance Communications claimed Yahoo's hiring of Nuance engineers was just a way to get Nuance's speech recognition technology without paying for it. CNET News has reported that Nuance is just going to have to deal with seeing its people report to Yahoo instead.

The court declined to hand out a temporary restraining order preventing the engineers from working for Yahoo. With the court unable to determine whether anything improper had taken place, it has instead scheduled a hearing for November 14th.

Nuance felt it had a case. Its former vice president of research and development, Larry Heck, had left Nuance for Yahoo after losing an internal power struggle in the wake of Nuance's merger with ScanSoft.

Also, Nuance had claimed Mr. Heck emailed himself a list of engineers Yahoo could recruit and an organizational plan for a new research and development department. When six of Nuance's engineers quit its Montreal operation to work for Yahoo in the city, Nuance noted that Yahoo didn't even have a Montreal operation until that defection.

Yahoo has claimed throughout that the suit was without merit, and in a statement said it was pleased with the court's decision today.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.