1105 Media, the parent company of Recharger Magazine and Recharger Magazine’s World Expo, has filed a complaint in a California Superior Court listing RechargeAsia Corp. and TonerTeck Corp. as defendants, and alleging that certain officers of RechargeAsia Corp., including Sunny "Yuping" Sun, wrongfully obtained trade secret information from Recharger Magazine, including Recharger’s full mailing list.
According to the complaint, Recharger Magazine protects its confidential and proprietary trade secret information, which includes the names and addresses of its customers. Recharger has spent millions of dollars and many personnel hours over the years building this information, and does not make it readily accessible to others.
“Our list is available for rental, as are the lists of many media companies,” said Adam Schaffer, Recharger’s Group Publisher. “However, this suit contends that there are several rules the company renting the list must agree to abide by when signing the contract before we will allow the information to be used by the customer.”
The complaint alleges that a company called TonerTeck obtained unauthorized access to Recharger’s customer trade secret information, and then provided that information to RechargeAsia. The complaint goes on to allege that had Recharger known of the affiliation between RechargeAsia and TonerTeck, steps would have been taken to ensure that TonerTeck would not have had access to the customer trade secret information.
It is further alleged that pursuant to written agreement, TonerTeck agreed not to disclose Recharger’s customer list, and that TonerTeck breached this agreement by disclosing the customer trade secret information to RechargeAsia.
The complaint then alleges that RechargeAsia used the information in the list to market its RechargExpo trade show as well as its competing magazine to Recharger’s customers.
The suit seeks, among other things, punitive damages, court costs and an injunction against the defendants.
No trial date had yet been set.
