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eBay Sued by Skype Inventors for Infringement

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have thrown a monkey wrench into eBay’s plans to sell off 65% of Skype

By Maureen O'Gara
Article Rating:
September 17, 2009 11:00 PM EDT
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 4,197

The Internet’s terrible twosome, Skype and Kazaa inventors Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, have thrown a monkey wrench into eBay’s plans to sell off 65% of Skype to an investor group led by Silver Lake and involving Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen for around $2 billion.

Zenstrom and Friis were clever enough to keep the P2P Global Index IP underneath Skype so they could reuse it for other ventures.

As Joltid, which holds the IP, they sued eBay and the members of the investment group in federal court in California Wednesday charging copyright infringement and asking for damages and an injunction. The suit claims damages are mounting at the rate of more than 75 million a day.

Joltid, which has a case against Skype pending in the UK, has already pulled its license to the software.

The Silver Lake consortium includes Michelangelo Volpi, the ex-CEO of Joost, another Zennstrom-Friis start-up using the P2P widgetry and now a partner in Index Ventures. They threw him off the Joost board over the weekend and announced that they were investigating his conduct as CEO.

eBay is supposed to be trying to come up with an IP workaround.

Published September 17, 2009 – Reads 4,197
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Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

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