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Skype Founders File Copyright Suit Against eBay
Saif writes to let us know that Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, have filed a copyright suit against eBay for altering and sharing the peer-to-peer source code behind the calling service. The founders managed to maintain ownership of the source and licensed it to eBay in their 2005 deal and are now seeking an injunction and statutory damages which could total more than $75 million per day. "Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis have developed a reputation for litigiousness in some legal circles. They filed three separate lawsuits against Pamela Colburn, an investment banker who represented them in the original sale of Skype, in the United States, the Netherlands and Britain. In May, a British judge dismissed the case and said the two men's reason for pursuing the matter in his country 'remains inexplicable.' The buyers of Skype have not publicly addressed the founders' lawsuit against eBay in Britain or their potential legal liability."
That's like a bitch slapping her pimp.
Break yourself, ho. Shiiit.
They sold Skype to eBay.
But managed to maintain ownership of a chunk of code because eBay's lawyers were fucking retarded.
They now claim eBay has altered that code, thus infringing on their copyrights.
Why are now suing for damages that could be up $75,000,000. Per day.
My question - how do they know the source doe was altered?
too many scallywagger sitting back and watching the idiots bid against a half dozen shills
too many stupid people in one place
like here
kazaa/fasttrack founders suing for copyright violation? it's hard to know just where to begin...
- js.
They should have just left negative feedback. Isn't that the policy for a bad transaction on eBay anyways?
1) if you "buy" an outfit, you should get the code that made it.
2) if you didn't, you should have modification rights.
3) if you "sell" an outfit, you should spend your money and not try to steal the sumbitch back.
conclusion: put them all in a room, with their laywers. on the titanic. hit an iceberg. it's a start.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
You can see he has a key with "(TM)" on it
If we can't get it working, can we at least have the editors strip the unicode out of the summaries?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I'll be generous... 2006 to 2009, 365 days per year minus about 100 days for the remainder of 2009, at $75 million per day. That's $102 billion...
eBay bought them for $2.6 billion in 2005. Revenue, according to a quick google lookup, has been about $1.1 billion in the years 2006 to 2009.
This seems ridiculous? Or am I reading this wrong?
The AP reported this a few days ago.
And today, they report that they are suing the potential buyers of Skype as well.
TOTAL PWNED!!!
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who became billionaires after selling Skype to eBay in 2005,....
Take your money, buy an island, fill it with beautiful naked women or use the money to start something else and add more value to the economy.
Suing just enriches the lawyers - they don't need any help - and it doesn't add anything of value to the economy.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Is it me or do those Skype founders seem pissed at the world? Lawsuit after lawsuit, firing CEO of their company and all. I think those guys need to change their dealer asap and take a chill pill.
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis were clearly not content to hack compelling software. Their travails sound like a Gibson novel. As far as I can tell, they made themselves the monarchs of Skype. One day, some enterprising journalist will tell us how the fuck they managed to sell Ebay an empty XBOX 360 box for billions of dollars.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
This might be a little bit off topic, but... Is there any good skype alternative? Something that works in linux, windows, and mac?
And today, they report that they are suing the potential buyers of Skype as well.
The reason the developer/owners are doing this is that they want to cash cow back. They are really trying to intimidate anyone thinking of buying Skype, and intimidating the current owners to sell to them.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
eBay / PayPal routinely shaft sellers out of PayPal payments, sweetly telling the post-coital shaftees to, "Read your user agreement, you explicitly agreed to accommodate our shaft."
Apparently those Kazaa guys' lawyers were skilled at placing a StealthShaft(TM) in the contract.
Take it eBay. Take it.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
First of all, it's old fashioned greed. I am very sure lawsuit is driven by lawyers, not founders themselves. Second, it could destroy Skype - and I really hope it does. I have my own share of dissatisfaction of Skype, but more or less my basic argument not to used - it is closed and not standartised. It eats resources like crazy. It has serious problems with quality of voice calls. And I'm tired of Skype not providing any way for thirty party to integrate their protocol in their products.
Most of my friends already uses Google Talk via various clients. Lots of them use also SIP services. Some two years ago lot of shops offered Skype accounts as call in for consulting. Not anymore. Skype is banned from many enterprises.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The Skype founders must be genius negotiators if they managed to sell their company to eBay for billions of dollars yet keep rights to the source code that runs the business. Either that or eBay's lawyers must be the world's biggest idiots.
eBay doesn't even have a source code license. They're just a binary licensee with a bulk buy deal, like any other end user of commercial software.
They bought the customer base, but not the software.
What's most interesting about the lawsuit is a single disclosure early in the lawsuit complaint. Not only does Skype not own the core P2P technology underlying the service, but they don't even have access to the source code (emphasis added):
A source code version of the GI Software is licenced by Joltid to Joost, allowing Joost to be the first company to successfully deliver television and other video content in real-time over a peer-to-peer network. An executable-only object code form of the GI Software was licensed by Loltid to Skype, a well-known Internet-based company that provides users throughout the world wiht free or low-cost telephone services over the Internet. Skype did not obtain a license to the GI Software source code, however, and the license it did obtain was terminated based on SKype's breaches of the license agreement.
I don't know enough of either suit to definitively make heads or tails out of it, but it appears that the code Skype is suing eBay over may not even be theirs to begin with.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
what exactly did they receive for their money...?
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