Skype's founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom -- via their company, Joltid -- yesterday filed a copyright suit against Skype and its core peer-to-peer technology. Needless to say, this "complicates" eBay's recent announced sale of a majority interest in Skype to a group of private investors including Marc Andreessen for $2 billion. And, to add insult to injury, the lawsuit names individual investors as defendants, contending that these investors had knowledge of Skype's copyright infringements when they negotiated their deal.
Wow, talk about audacity! Let's not forget that Skype's founders pocketed a few bills when they sold their company to eBay a few years back for more than $3 billion. And, for eBay, talk about naivete if they spent that much money to buy Skype from its founders and somehow "forgot" to firmly secure the basic IP rights they needed to run the company! Where are those eBay lawyers now?
Look, I haven't had a chance to review the lawsuit. But, it seems to me that when someone sells something for $3 billion+, they should really be selling it ... (and, on the flip-side, when someone is buying something, they should make sure they are really buying it).
Hey, we sold my last company, IP calling service SightSpeed, to Logitech last November for $30 million. And, we really sold it -- everything -- all IP (including better P2P technology than Skype's). Imagine that?
Bottom line -- as my clever colleague Eric Quanstrom said to me this morning -- eBay just got jolted by Joltid!
