eBay scuffles with Skype founders
eBay's plan to spin off Skype with an initial public offering in 2010 is being threatened by a dispute with the VoIP service's co-founders, who still own a key part of the software. Bloomberg reports Skype's founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have accused eBay of breaching a licensing deal and are threatening to yank the …
Well, who'd a thunk it?
eBay not properly reading the small print on a contract.
Ha fucking ha!
"Karma" is the word that springs to mind.
> ebay chief John Donahoe reckons Skype is worth more than $2bn
So ... where are those future earnings coming from?
I could care less about both of these companies. What concerns me a lot more is why the British taxpayer is funding a legal dispute between two large foreign companies.
It's great to see an army of lawyers f*ck up by not reading contracts written by another army of lawyers.
I believe we have one of those hanging in UK too... TFL didn't ensure they owned the name Oyster, so come contract renewal time, if they go to someone else, they'll have to rebrand the entire system as the current supplier owns the rights to the name.
Great way to ensure you remain as the supplier for life eh ;-)
WTF are you going on about?
"British taxpayer is funding a legal dispute between two large foreign companies"
Where is it said that the British taxpayer is pay anything in this court case? OK there using the English legal system, which they will have to pay for using. Going to court in this sort case is not cheap on ether party!
I am just dumb founder that you think that British taxpayer is paying for court case.
The funny thing is eBay singing a contract and they do not own the keys to the castle. LOL
"The Skype founders apparently retained the service's peer-to-peer sharing technology when they sold to eBay for $2.6bn in 2005. (Which, of course, begs the question why eBay would pay all that money without ensuring they own the entire platform)."
Perhaps eBay learned their asset purchase skills from SCO?
Surely ebay didn't spend 2.6bn without obtaining the rights to the IPR - that would be one of the biggest tech takeover fails of all time if they did...
Very simple:
The British government has a vested interest in making sure, that their intelligence agencies get their hands on the technology in order to make it easier to tap into skype.
Call me paranoid, but when I look at what has been going on over the past two years in regards of freedom of speech, information being stored as a preventative measure (web-traffic info, call-logs etc), other information being kept secret from the public, and everything under the disguise of either anti-terrorism, or anti-kiddi-porn!!!
Am I the only one suspecting a hidden agenda here?
'I could care less about both of these companies. What concerns me a lot more is why the British taxpayer is funding a legal dispute between two large foreign companies.'
I think you mean that you couldn't care less. However, the issue is, what makes you think that either company will get legal aid. I'm sure they will have to pay all costs including court costs, no matter who wins.
Unlike you, I could *not* care less. Have you tried sueing anyone these days? It's not free!
... they would roll out sip side by side with the exisiting system.
Then they would have a complete infrastructure they could use.
but not buying the whole thing for all that money shows an absence of sense anyway.
Wasn't the purchase stock plus cash, ie. some real moolah but mainly the fantasy stuff of the stockmarket? Like so many other dot.com takeovers the price had little to do with the value - cf. Microsoft's investment in Facebook. Skype's real value was never as a business but as a purveyor of a disruptive technology that helped change the perceptions over the cost of making a phone call. It is incredibly difficult to make money in any market with falling margins unless the market or your market share is expanding sufficiently to offset the falling margins. Well, voice isn't expanding that much and Skype's market share of paid for calls isn't that impressive. There is no way the business is worth even $1 billion in real money.
please please please please please break it!!!
And bury it into /dev/null then we'll get usable open standard compliant VoIP services...
