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A blog post on DSL Reports talks about how VoIP service provider MagicJack brought the wrong kind of attention to itself when it sued gadget and culture blog Boing Boing for a “defamatory” post in 2008.

Apparently the blog post on Boing Boing highlighted “some of MagicJack's more dubious practices, including their bogus free trial user counter, their use of behavioral ad technology, and their inclusion of arbitration language in their terms of service.”

 

MagicJack responded by suing Boing Boing – but this week the court threw the case out -- in fact, actually reversed it and slapped MagicJack with a $50,000 fine -- when reportedly it was uncovered that some of the complaints about MagicJack were not without merit.

 

Some of the things MagicJack has been accused of include “snooping” on customers as part of a scheme to use caller data to deliver targeted advertising based on calling patterns; artificially inflating the “hit counter” used to show the number of trail participants on its Web site; and stating that “today is the last day of a free trial promotion, every single day,” according to the blog post.

DSL Reports blogger Karl Bode makes a good point when he writes that “in the Internet age, the harder a company works to stifle criticism, the more attention that criticism gets. The better path is perhaps to listen to what your customers are saying about your business practices, and change them where possible if you value your customers.”

MagicJack made news on TMCnet last month when it introduced “the smallest and cheapest plug and play femtocell technology” on the market.

“MagicJack’s femtocell technology helps users’ cell phones or smartphones access the Internet via its Voice Network, instead of their own carrier network,” TMCnet’s Carolyn J. Dawson wrote. “Users can offset accumulated cellular minutes which could result in savings of several thousand dollars annually. A magicJack account costs only $20 a year. The savings can jump to 95 percent to100 percent of current cellular carrier rates when calling internationally. The Femtocell (News - Alert) technology also delivers high voice quality consistently to users.”

Regardless of the bad publicity, most people are of the opinion that MagicJack’s VoIP service works well and delivers good value.