Court Swings in Zoom's Favor in Ongoing Zoom-RingCentral Court Battle

A federal court has sided with Zoom in this week’s ruling in the ongoing Zoom-RingCentral court battle.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dissolved a temporary restraining order against Zoom and denied RingCentral’s motion for preliminary injunction. Zoom’s lawsuit alleges RingCentral breached its agreement and infringed on its trademarks.

The sealed ruling also refers action for a mandatory settlement conference.

Earlier this month, the court issued the temporary restraining order against Zoom. It allowed RingCentral to continue selling Zoom’s services to new customers under the companies’ agreement.

Zoom alleges RingCentral engaged in unfair competition and false designation of origin, breach of contract, and violation of the California Business and Professionals Code. The lawsuit seeks an injunction barring RingCentral from using its trademark, and for the company to turn over all profits and gains from the use of its trademarks.

Zoom has been trying to terminate its agreement with RingCentral since last summer.

Zoom Pleased with Ruling

“We are pleased with this initial ruling in favor of Zoom and look forward to resolving this issue through the continuing legal process,” a Zoom spokesperson said. “We believe RingCentral is inappropriately using Zoom to attract new customers, only to then switch them over to its own inferior meetings product. This is unfair to customers, who deserve better. We’ll continue to support legacy RingCentral Meeting customers until the end of our contract sunset period. But we are not enabling Zoom for RingCentral customers signed up after the sunset period began on Feb. 1, 2021. If RingCentral truly believes in their own meeting product, they should use it.”

RingCentral sent us the following statement:

“The court has decided that the legal process should continue. As part of our RingCentral Office product, we have been providing customers our own video capability, RingCentral Video, since April 2020. We are very happy with the customer adoption and momentum of our video capabilities. We also believe in giving customers choices. We have faith in the judicial process and are confident that we will prevail in the end.”

The two companies have partnered for more than seven years, providing video conferencing services for RingCentral to resell under its own RingCentral Meetings brand. However, RingCentral rolled out its own video conferencing service, RingCentral Video, last April.

RingCentral continued to market and sell Zoom products to new customers. However, RingCentral claims it is in the process of switching these customers to non-Zoom products.