Hello everybody, The question I have is not pertaining to an online business, but an offline business. Without giving too much details, a friend of mine had his girlfriend working for him, compiling and organizing his customer list. They broke up, and it seems that she sold his customer list to a competitor company. Now, there was no signed affidavit that she was bound to at any point, but to me I feel that there must be some sort of law prohibiting the sale of a customer list that was attained as a gig. Please if you have any insights to shed, I'd love to hear them.
That depends. If your friend took reasonable measures to protect the customer list, and if the list is valuable because it is kept secret, then his girl friend may have violated his state's trade secret act. If the girl friend was a common law employee, she may have violated a fiduciary duty. The results will vary from state to state as this is covered by state statutes or case law. He would really need to consult a lawyer in his own state and lay out more of the details to get any reasonable input on whether his girl friend violated any laws or common law duties.
Because I want to make it clearer to all readers of this post than perhaps Business Attorney did -- and because I believe a more forceful answer is needed -- Anytime you take something that does not belong to you and sell it you are violating many, many laws; and criminal laws as well as civil laws. I do not think it depends on the circumstances as much as the post by Business Attorney may make it appear to some. Just because the girlfriend in the example here had access to the list does not give her any rights to the list. A good analogy would be saying a chauffer has the rights to sell the car they are driving. Business Attorney was correct to tell you to contact an attorney (always good advice), but I think you will find the girlfriend will not have a defense for her actions.
I have customer list of aloe vera buyers I could sell, inexpensive its legal to sell I did obtain the customers myself thanks aloeking