Ex-Yahoo employees planned defection over IM, suit says

February 27, 2006 | Matt Marshall

the IM snag

Yahoo has filed suit against a group of seven former employees for stealing trade secrets, drawing heavily from archived Yahoo instant-messaging conversations between the group.

Duh, as TechDirt notes, if you’re going to plot a departure from Yahoo, you might want to just bite the bullet and use enemy tools such as Google Talk or something.

The group of seven discussed their plans on IM as they planned their departure to a wireless content company in San Francisco, MForma, according to the suit. CNET reports:

According to the lawsuit, which was filed Monday in a Santa Clara County state court, the group of seven former Yahoo employees copied large amounts of confidential business and technical data when they left the Web portal company, and brought it to use in their new positions at MForma.

In a statement, MForma Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Sacks said Yahoo “deserves the gold medal for hypocrisy,” noting that the Web company had itself been recently sued on trade secrets grounds by Nuance Communications, after hiring a team of that company’s employees.

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About the Author, Matt Marshall

Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.