Less than three weeks after eBay announced official plans to sell Skype, Skype’s founders decided they won’t be playing nice. Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis filed suit against both eBay and private investors via Jolitd Ltd., a firm owned by the two from which Skype licenses peer-to-peer technology. The suit alleges copyright infringement and requests a permanent injunction against Skype along with damages.
According to the lawsuit:
The Skype companies have continued to infringe Joltid’s copyrighted works on a massive scale. Each day that the Skype Companies continue to make available its Internet telephone software for download, Skype users download Joltid’s copyrighted works approximately six times per second.
That’s a lot of copyright infringing, and a big problem for eBay, which claims to remain on track to sell the company in Q4. Friis and Zennstrom have since been contacting private venture groups in an attempt to buy back the Skype business. However this one shakes out, I’d guess it’s going to be pretty ugly.
Source: Reuters
