eBay Sues Skype Founders

eBay is suing the two founders of Skype, even as that pair say the Internet auction giant breached a licensing deal and threaten to pull the technology.

You may well remember that Internet auction giant eBay bought VoIP leader Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005, making very rich men of Skype’s co-founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Now, however, relations seem to have fractured, according to Bloomberg.

It would appear that one thing eBay didn’t purchase was Skype’s peer-to-peer sharing technology. As eBay prepares a Skype IPO for next year, Zennstrom and Friis have accused to company of breaching the licensing deal they made and are threatening to pull their technology – which would render the service useless, of course.

All of which has led to eBay suing Joltid, the company owned by Zennstrom and Friis, in England.

It would seem that Joltid has the upper hand for now, since the fracas could delay the IPO or scare off potential investors, which mean eBay might have to look for other alternatives to raise cash from Skype.