EBay may have to rebuild core Skype technology over licensing dispute
It would seem that eBay made a rather large mistake when it purchased Skype back in September 2005, as in that it forgot to make sure it had all of the rights to the core technology that powered the service.
While the purchase of Skype by eBay left many people puzzled as to how the two services would be integrated, it is doubtful that anyone would have ever pondered the concept that eBay hadn’t done all of its due dillagence to make sure it had all of the rights to the core technologies.
Joltid Ltd., a company owned by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, claims that the core technology that powers the popular VoIP service was merely licensed to Skype, and that the rights to use it have now expired. The company claims that Skype is now illegally using the technology and has gone to court to stop the use of the disputed software. On the other side, eBay is asking that the case be dismissed and Joltid be forced to pay all legal costs involved with the case.
All of this could not come at a worse time for eBay as the company has been preparing to make a stock IPO for Skype in early 2010 and spin the service off into its own entity. Due to the pending legal actions that is now unlikely to happen just leading to even more uncertainty about the future of the popular VoIP solution.
While all of this is happening, eBay has turned to software engineers to rebuild the service from the ground up, but that may not be all that easy due to the number of patents that already exist in the arena. “It would be quite difficult to replace what they already have as the underlying component to their service,” Jayanth Angl, an analyst at Info-Tech Research Group told Bloombergs. He also went on to add, “There are a number of barriers to that, not the least of which are legal barriers.”
All of this could also have something to do with the fact that three months ago it was reported that Zennstrom and Friis was trying to raise the capital to buy Skype back from eBay. If the software which the entire company is built upon could possible be pulled in a legal battle, in theory eBay may have to take any money they can get for the service just to get it off its books. This is of course pure speculation, but it is not too difficult to imagine.
Skype currently enjoys a subscriber base of 480 million users around the world, and the dissolution of the service would mean many companies and families would lose a key component of their communications plans to other people across the planet. This whole issue goes well beyond eBay, Skype and Joltid at this point, but we’ll all have to sit around and hold out collective breath for the time being in hopes that some sort of resolution can be reached that will keep the service alive.
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