The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has granted an urgent interlocutory injunction requiring a startup co-founder and chief technology officer to immediately surrender critical source code, administrative passwords, and software repositories to his company. The decision, issued by Justice Audrey P. Ramsay on August 18, 2026 prevents the company from losing access to the core technology that powers its cross-country pharmacy delivery platform1.
DeliveryEase Inc. was incorporated in July 2023 to provide specialized pharmaceutical delivery logistics across Canada, connecting pharmacies, retailers, and medical service providers through a proprietary web portal and mobile driver application. Abdel Tahir, who served as the company’s Chief Technology Officer, co-founder, director, and 25 percent shareholder, developed the underlying software. He also operated through his wholly owned company, Adelpha Technologies Inc.
Relations between the founding partners deteriorated significantly in late 2025 and early 2026. DeliveryEase alleged that Mr. Tahir unilaterally withheld administrative access and login credentials to the company’s source code, which was hosted on cloud platforms Bitbucket and GitHub. According to the plaintiff, Mr. Tahir refused to grant the company access unless the other shareholders agreed to buy out his equity stake. In response, DeliveryEase launched an action claiming damages for misappropriation, breach of contract, and breach of common law duties, and brought an urgent motion seeking mandatory injunctive relief to regain control of its software.
The plaintiff argued that it owned all rights in the software assets pursuant to written assignment agreements executed in late 2024, effective as of July 7, 2023. DeliveryEase maintained that Mr. Tahir had researched, drafted, and signed the first agreement on behalf of AdelphaTech to satisfy external investors who injected $300,000 in capital into the business. The company also argued that Mr. Tahir created and maintained the technology during the course of his employment as Chief Technology Officer, automatically conferring copyright ownership to DeliveryEase under section 13(3) of the Copyright Act.
Mr. Tahir and AdelphaTech resisted the motion, maintaining that AdelphaTech owned the underlying architecture because Mr. Tahir had built the foundational software framework beginning in October 2022, well before DeliveryEase was incorporated. The defendants contended that the assignment agreement was invalid due to commercial pressure, lack of independent legal advice, and absence of consideration, and argued that it only covered new enhancements rather than pre-existing intellectual property. Furthermore, Mr. Tahir argued that he worked as an independent contractor rather than an employee, and he objected to DeliveryEase transferring technical access to Guarana Technology Services Inc., a third-party development agency hired by the company.
Before addressing the substantive test for injunctive relief, Justice Ramsay resolved two preliminary procedural disputes. The court denied the defendants leave to introduce a late supplementary affidavit delivered after cross-examinations were finished, ruling that it was an impermissible attempt to alter substantive testimony regarding non-disclosure agreements rather than merely correcting a minor interpreter error. The court also declined to stay the proceedings in favour of arbitration, observing that no formal cross-motion was before the court and that section 6.02 of the parties’ amended Unanimous Shareholders Agreement expressly allowed the parties to seek equitable remedies in court.
Applying the established three-stage framework from RJR-MacDonald Inc. v. Canada (Attorney General), Justice Ramsay first assessed whether DeliveryEase had established a serious issue to be tried. The court found that the plaintiff met this threshold regarding both the written assignment of copyright and Mr. Tahir’s status as an employee.
Under section 13(4) of the Copyright Act, a valid assignment of copyright requires only a written document signed by the copyright owner. The court noted that Mr. Tahir admitted to drafting and signing the document himself, and repeatedly referred to the intellectual property as belonging to DeliveryEase in ordinary business correspondence, emails, and formal legal correspondence sent by his former lawyer.
Justice Ramsay noted that while Mr. Tahir alleged he was pressured into signing the agreement, his materials provided no factual particulars regarding who pressured him, the circumstances of the coercion, or any contemporaneous protests. Applying the legal test for economic duress from the Court of Appeal for Ontario, the court found that Mr. Tahir was a sophisticated technology professional with extensive enterprise software experience who took no steps to avoid the agreement for over a year while continuing to perform paid work for the startup. Additionally, the court highlighted that the defendants had explicitly admitted in their statement of defence that Mr. Tahir was an employee and officer of the company, which supported the statutory presumption of employer copyright ownership under section 13(3) of the Copyright Act.
On the second branch of the test, Justice Ramsay concluded that DeliveryEase faced a real risk of irreparable harm that could not be remedied through monetary damages after a trial. Uncontested evidence showed that retail giant Wal-Mart accounted for approximately 85 percent of the startup’s total revenue. Because Mr. Tahir was the sole individual with administrative access to the codebase, DeliveryEase missed a strict June 1 deadline to implement mandatory electronic signature features required by Wal-Mart, placing its single largest client relationship in immediate jeopardy. The court held that being locked out of the software threatened to destroy the company’s goodwill, disrupt its driver fleet, prevent it from raising necessary capital, and entirely shut down its ongoing business operations.
Finally, the court held that the balance of convenience favoured granting the injunction to preserve the operational status quo. Justice Ramsay found that DeliveryEase required uninterrupted access to the platform to service its customers, whereas any proprietary or financial claims Mr. Tahir might establish at a future trial could be adequately compensated with financial damages. The court also found merit in DeliveryEase’s submission that the defendants had not demonstrated clean hands, having repeatedly acknowledged company ownership of the technology before withholding access.
Under the formal order, Justice Ramsay prohibited Mr. Tahir and AdelphaTech from restricting DeliveryEase’s access to its source code, cloud platforms, servers, and databases. The order directed the defendants to immediately deliver all administrative credentials, multi-factor authentication controls, and repository access for GitHub and Bitbucket to DeliveryEase’s representative, Alessandro Manca, enabling the company to continue its operations pending trial.
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