Skype Dispute Nears End, The Blackmailing Of Ebay (EBAY)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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nokAn intellectual property dispute between Skype’s founders and the VoIP company, now owned by Ebay (NASDAQ:EBAY),  threatened the auction company’s  plans to sell Skype to private equity interests. That dispute is about to be settled, clearing the way for Skype to become independent.

Ebay will make $2 billion for selling about two-thirds of Skype. Skype’s founders have claimed that the VoIP company’s technology violates certain patents that they hold.

Several media accounts say that private equity firm Index Ventures Management S.A will drop from the buyout group and be replaced by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. This would presumably would give them the chance to profit from the company’s future success.

Ebay gets what it wants, no matter how the dispute is resolved. It exits a business which never fit with its auction operations or its PayPal online payment system and leaves behind the most embarrassing chapter in its history–the day it bought Skype.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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