Legal Issues

Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick


Filed Under:
lawsuits, voip

Companies:
sunrocket, vonage




Ghost Of SunRocket Sues Vonage For Spamming The Customers It Cut Off

from the need-some-money-now dept

VoIP provider SunRocket's troubles and subsequent collapse are well known, leading many to wonder if it's a warning sign for Vonage's prospects. Of course, Vonage (unwisely) decided to dance on SunRocket's grave, celebrating that it had caused SunRocket to go out of business. Perhaps they should have waited until SunRocket was really, totally dead. The whole taking credit for SunRocket's demise might come back to bite them as the ghost of SunRocket is now suing Vonage for emailing SunRocket's customer list. Apparently, the two companies had discussed, under a confidentiality agreement, Vonage buying SunRocket's customers or customer list, but talks never went very far. Soon afterwards Vonage emailed SunRocket's customers asking with an offer to move over to Vonage's service. The liquidation firm handling the SunRocket shutdown (incidentally, it's Marty, the dot com cleanup guy's firm) potentially saw this as an easy lawsuit to try to recover some cash for SunRocket, and sued Vonage for violating the confidentiality agreement. Vonage insists that it acquired the list legally, outside of the discussions with SunRocket. Neither party comes out of this looking very good, but that seems to be pretty typical in the independent VoIP space lately.

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 

Reader Comments (rss)

(Flattened / Threaded)

  1. by Anonymous Coward - Aug 24th, 2007 @ 6:46pm

    It's an argument between one company that is already out of business, and another company that is on it's way to being out of business.

    Once again, nobody wins but the lawyers.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  2. by Matt Bennett - Aug 27th, 2007 @ 10:35am

    It's actually sounds like a pretty open and shut case in SunRockets favor. You're in negotiations, you have an NDA, you see the customer list. It's then pretty clear that you can't use that info regadless if you can claim to have come across it independently or not.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  3. Re: "Open and shut case"

    by What do you know - Aug 28th, 2007 @ 8:30am

    How can you say "open and shut" if you do not know the terms of the nda?

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Plain Text HTML Save me a cookie
  • Plain Text: A CRLF will be replaced by break <br> tag, all other allowable HTML is intact
  • HTML: No formatting of any kind is done without explicitly being written in
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <p> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>
Close
Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Plain Text HTML Save me a cookie
Search Techdirt
And now, a word from our Sponsors..
Subscribe to Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Related Stories
Close
E-mail It