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

from the need-some-money-now dept

Fri, Aug 24th 2007 4:55pm — Mike Masnick

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.

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Filed Under: lawsuits, voip
Companies: sunrocket, vonage

3 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 24 Aug 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.
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Matt Bennett, 27 Aug 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.
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- What do you know, 28 Aug 2007 @ 8:30am
  
  Re: "Open and shut case"
  How can you say "open and shut" if you do not know the terms of the nda?
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