Skype founders sue Skype

Jake Widman
Friday, 18 September 2009 00:56

Your IT - Home IT

The ongoing dispute between the founders of online phone service Skype and the company they sold it to, eBay, has been ratcheted up another level with the filing of a copyright suit in U.S. District Court. The suit claims that JoltId, the software company currently owned by the Skype founders, is suffering damages of US$75 million a day from eBay's actions.

eBay purchased the popular Web phone service Skype in 2005 for more than US$2.6 billion.

By early this year, however, the two parties were arguing over exactly how much of Skype eBay owned -- in particular, what rights the company had to the underlying Skype technology.

In March, Skype (as part of eBay) filed a claim against JoltId in the U.K., seeking to clarify the terms of the license. JoltId in turn filed a counterclaim that Skype the company did not have the rights to some of the Skype source code and that the license should be terminated.

Analysts questioned whether Skype would be able to stay in business should the decision go against them.

Then, earlier this month, eBay announced plans to sell 65 percent of Skype for nearly $2 billion to an investor group. Now the JoltId owners -- the original founders of Skype, remember -- have filed a copyright suit in California against eBay, claiming that Skype is using its technology without authorization.

JoltId estimates the damages from the alleged unauthorized use run to $75 million a day and has asked for an injunction against Skype. "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," according to the suit.

eBay has issued a statement saying that it still expects to close the sale of Skype by the end of the year. No word yet from the investment group.