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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."
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?
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?
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?
Why did EBay agree to the terms where they did not get control of the source when they bought Skype? Shame on Ebay for making this possible when they bought Skype with a bajillion of their shareholders money. I predict that this will lead to a class action suit by Ebay shareholders against Ebay.
conclusion: put them all in a room, with their laywers. on the titanic. hit an iceberg. it's a start.
Unfortunately, the Titanic sank in 1912. A chubby red-haired woman survived, but a floppy haired blonde guy froze in the water. There was a movie about it a few years ago.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Beautiful naked women aren't bought - they are leased. Finding them is relatively easy - they will seek out the cash. Lease and operations rates are typically high, but very manageable if your bank account balance looks like a phone number. Since you can only lease BNW, they are always deductible provided sufficient accounting creativity.
If the founders are looking for men, the same applies, however overall costs tends to be greater.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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 you spend millions to buy something and never have anybody who understands what you are buying read the contract, you deserve what you get. Read the fine print... http://www.mevis-research.de/~meyer/MISC/di/a.htm
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.
Can I suggest you contact your local ACORN office? They can help you set up a tax dodge for the island and probably arrange women through their contacts in Tijuana...
This might be a little bit off topic, but... Is there any good skype alternative? Something that works in linux, windows, and mac?
If I wanted to buy a person. I would take the amount of money they would need in a life time to support a family, and multiply it by 10. That should allow you to find a naked woman to by. Beauty is subjective. Let's say for here: http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/counties/12086 (Miami-Dade, Florida). So about 3 million dollars. For 2.6 billion, you could have about 867 naked women MAX
For a minimum, I'ld look at what porn stars get paid. A good porn start can make about 750K/year. Assuming that you want top quality women for the rest of your life (50 years), you could have 69 women minimum (rotating the old ones out and new ones in as they age and your preferences change).
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.
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.
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.