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Skype Off The Hook |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Wednesday, 24 January 2007 |
Racketeering charges bought against eBay, Skype, its
founders and a cast of related defendants has been thrown out of court
according to an Associated Press Report.
U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, concluded Streamcast
had failed to make in a January 18 ruling on a motion for dismissal, according
to the report.
The Judge dismissed all claims against Skype, eBay and more
than a dozen other defendants.
Streamcast Networks the company behind peer to peer file
sharing system Morpheus was seeking "unspecified damages" of more than US$4.1
billion. It also wants a court order to stop eBay selling Skype services, which
it claims is based on technology it was cheated out of.
You can read the background here, but basically, Streamcast
claims that Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis promised to sell it
the FastTrack file sharing technology the two used to help millions of Internet
users steal copyright protected material back in the Kazaa days.
It was the duo's first steps to becoming billionaires. After
selling Kazaa when the copyright holders started closing in they launched Skype
a peer-to-peer phone system. Ultimately they then sold that business to eBay
for US2.6 Billion plus earn-out.
Streamcast claims the FastTrack technology is the peer-to-peer
technology used in Skype and that Zennstrom and Friis sold to eBay without
giving them the first refusal of refusal as per the agreement.
Streamcast's legal counsel says the case is "far from over"
and that either an appeal or a newline of legal action pursuit is the next
step.
Zennstrom and Friis contributed a
reported US$100 million for a settlement deal between Sharman Networks, the
company that acquired Kazaa, and the music industry which had their copyright content
stolen as a result of the FastTrack technology.
Zennstrom and Friis didn't develop FastTrack themselves but
in fact contracted a team of Estonian developers to do the work.
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