Washington, DC – Infogroup tried to bully its founder and former CEO Vin Gupta by bringing a frivolous lawsuit against his new company DatabaseUSA but John M. Gerrard, United States District Judge ruled against Infogroup on all counts.
Judge Gerrard in his judgement noted, “Infogroup’s various motions are denied,” as the court documents went into details rebutting Infogroup’s allegations.
In the court document the judgment says, “The information in Infogroup’s database is not wholly unavailable to the world at large—to begin with, while some data may come from private sources or Infogroup’s own information-gathering, a substantial amount of the data is compiled from publicly-available sources.”
Countering the evidence being submitted by Infogroup, the Court said, “DatabaseUSA’s evidence also casts substantial doubt on whether any of the individual employee defendants could have obtained the data at issue. Three of the five individual defendants were terminated by Infogroup before the November 2011 seed data was inserted into the Infogroup database.”
“There is no evidence in the record of any customer of DatabaseUSA who claims to have been deceived or misled by the claim that a DatabaseUSA listing was “verified.” Nor does the Court find bad faith or an intent to deceive, given the evidence of the efforts DatabaseUSA makes to verify its data,” the judge noted in the final statement.
Judge Gerrard noted, “Infogroup’s claim has another problem: Infogroup has not shown that it has been injured or is likely to be injured by DatabaseUSA’s actions.”
Judging “Gupta’s identification of himself as the founder of Infogroup and its associated entities” as “accurate”, the Judge noted, “Gupta is entitled to accurately describe his experience in the industry when marketing his company’s products and services.”
In his judgement, he continued, “The Court finds that Gupta’s descriptions of his experience are sufficiently accurate to avoid preliminary injunctive relief—particularly the sweeping injunction sought by Infogroup against any marketing materials “to the effect that Gupta founded InfoUSA, or any Infogroup company.”
On the famous “60 Minutes” references, and description of DatabaseUSA as having been creating databases “since 1972,” the judge said, “neither the “60 Minutes” excerpts, nor the slogan, make any direct reference to Infogroup.”
On the allegations of staff hiring. the Court said, “Another (staff) was not hired by DatabaseUSA until after the June 2013 audit that discovered the seed data. And none of the former Infogroup employees (with the presumable exception of Gupta, who was out the door by 2008) had the necessary access to Infogroup’s database to have perpetrated a heist.”