Skype Woes Continue to Increase
As the week moves along, Skype’s woes do not seem to stop. First, we have them dragged by AMD into Intel’s Anti-trust case about giving preferencial treatment to Intel. Next, we have the Skype-Streamcast rowwhere Streamcast threatens to sue Skype over rights to a particular peer-to-peer technology.
Now, the morpheus makers are finally suing Skype for racketeering? The InformationWeek article states:
StreamCast Networks Inc., the company behind the Morpheus peer-to-peer file-sharing client, has filed suit against VoIP company Skype Technologies SA and its founders on racketeering charges. The lawsuit claims that peer-to-peer client maker Kazaa B.V., also founded by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, violated StreamCast’s exclusive rights to the peer-to-peer technology behind Kazaa, known as FastTrack P2P, by selling it to a shell company.
The suit charges that Zennstrom and Friis secretly sold FastTrack despite StreamCast’s contractual right to prevent the deal, and that the defendants shut down StreamCast’s Morpheus network and transferred its user base to Kazaa. Skype comes into the picture in a more indirect route. The suit says Skype uses FastTrack technology to transfer calls across the Internet and notes Zennstrom and Friis have “profited handsomely” from Skype’s $4.1 billion sale to eBay.
Looks like your regular case of “why did you pull the rug off my feet?” The suit is primarily about Fasttrack P2P but it has some how dragged Skype into the picture because of Skype’s use of the same P2P technology. For the first time since its purchase by eBay, this high flyer VoIP company might be forced to slow down a bit and handle this case carefully. The AMD issues can be resolved with a slap on the wrist. But, this is something more serious. Didn’t eBay find out about it in the due dilligence?
And to top it all. All of this has occured in the last month. So the dotcom world is not just fast when it comes to companies flying but also fast when it comes to dying?
