At the High Court in Auckland this morning, Yellow gained an injunction against Image Marketing Group (IMG), which it accuses of selling a pirated version of its database.

Justice Woodhouse granted the injunction, pending a full trial, after IMG failed to defend itself at the hearing. In a fax, the company said it had been unable to find funds to engage a lawyer. 

Yellow - owner of the The Yellow Pages in print, the yellow.co.nz website and the 018 calling service - claims that IMG illegally obtained around 315,000 business names featured in its directory.

IMG, trading as NZ Data, then sold the business names in a product called New Zealand Data Database Version 3.0, which was advertised for $6500.

Yellow said that several sales had been made for $3500, although it did not know the exact number. Additional sales had been made at half that price again since Yellow began to take action on November 6.

IMG is owned by Brendan Battles, best known on the New Zealand IT scene as “the spam king”.

Mr Battles hit the news most recently in March as he switched his junk marketing efforts from email to cellphone txt messages.

Speaking to NBR after this morning’s hearing, Yellow legal counsel Toby Sharpe said it was unknown how Mr Battles obtained a copy of his company’s database.

The matter will be addressed at the trial.

However, Mr Sharpe noted that there are a number of “data scraping” tools available, which allow a copyright infringer to automate the process of copying listings en masse from a public site like yellow.co.nz.

Although Justice Woodhouse allowed media to cover the hearing, some information held in affidavits, including steps Yellow takes to protect and identify its own data, was not revealed to reporters.

Businesses typically plant "seeds" in a database, or a handful of bogus names and addresses that will betray anybody who tries to claim a copy was in fact their own work.

Innocent businesses out of pocket
The number of companies that bought IMG’s database is unknown.

Justice Woodhouse also ordered IMG to hand over the names of every business that had bought its database product. All will be required to stop using it.

Mr Sharpe said it would be up to each company that innocently bought the stolen data to take its own action against IMG.

Suspicious competitor
Yellow does not sell its business listings en masse, but has a subsidiary, DataMarket, which sells subsets of its database.

Mr Sharpe said Yellow first became aware of Mr Battles' operation when its DataMarket customers began telling its sales reps they'd found a cheaper alternative.

Justice Woodhouse also awarded Yellow costs for the proceedings up until this point.

The action was brought by Yellow and its fully-owned subsidiary Finda.

The trial is expected to take place in around six months.