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."

Comments

Basically

[sexconker]

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?

Re:Basically

[Anonymous McCartneyf]

Because eBay, in a fit of insanity equal to failing to obtain the copyright to that code in the first place, shared the altered code. eBay distributed it. Did they really think the founders of Skype wouldn't see?
Copyright law -- is there any chaos it can't cause?

Re:Basically

[Bigjeff5]

Changing the code was perfectly legal, so long as they only used it internally or developed a compiled product with it. That's why they licensed the source code in the first place.

However, distributing the code is not legal. It sounds to me like someone at Ebay was dumbass enough to think that minor changes would be enough to alter the copyright, making it theirs and therefore distributable. In fact, depending on the license they agreed to, it may have legal to distribute the altered portions only, or not at all. Either way, to make re-distributing the code legal would have required a substantial re-write, basically just using the Skype code as a guide and not much more than that.

The Skype founders may be overly-litigeous bastards, but on the surface it sounds like they are in the right on this one.

Re:Basically

[coolsnowmen]

you've clearly never tried to look at skype's code then. It has multiple levels of code obfuscation.

Last I checked the majority of the program's contents are encrypted. The loader decrypts it into memory, and also deletes the boot-loader from memory. Additionally, the the program will try and detect if you are running it in a debugging environment and jump into random pages. This in turn is hard to detect because seemingly random jumps are all over the code from checking checksum's on itself (to make sure you didn't put in software debugging).

I'm not even explaining this fully-
from: http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/355
read: http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf

Re:Basically

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

With all the shit ebay has pulled over the years, and I'm not just referring to ridiculous fee increase, but all the ways they have given third parties veto power over auctions (e.g. try selling a copy MS windows on ebay and watch the auction be disappeared because MS thinks all copies of windows sold by individuals are pirated and ebay just lets them cancel auctions independently) its basically a case of ebay getting hoisted by their own petard (live by arbitrary and unfriendly contracts, die by arbitrary and unfriendly contracts).

KaZaaM!

[JackSpratts]

kazaa/fasttrack founders suing for copyright violation? it's hard to know just where to begin...

- js.