Sipphone sues Vonage and Fry's over new hardware

You might know him best as the founder of MP3.com or the guy behind Lindows (or Linspire or whatever they're calling it now), but Michael Robertson has another company up his sleeve called SIPphone. Basically a VoIP phone service, they've recently filed a lawsuit against electronics retailer Fry's and VoIP competitor Vonage alleging that the packaging of Linksys' new Linksys Phone Adapter and RT31P2 Broadband Router (pictured at right) is misleading. Since they're not suing Linksys at all you're probably wondering what the hell Vonage (not to mention Fry's) has to do with all this, but basically the Linksys gear is locked down so it'll only work with Vonage's VoIP service, and SIPphone thinks this is misleading since people might buy the equipment thinking they can use it with SIPphone or somebody else's VoIP service. To Sipphone, this isn't fair — not only do the customers not have a choice of their VoIP service, but they may not know that they will be charged a monthly fee for the service. Are they just whining? SIPphone does market its own competing hardware, but the real question is just how confusing the packaging and marketing of the Linksys gear really is. It's not like Vonage really has anything to gain by people being tricked into buying the Linksys gear and then not signing up for their broadband telephone service. This one is for the courts to decide…