Lawsuit Settled!

The lawsuit filed by the Skype founders against eBay have been settled. Ebay has agreed to give the two founders a 14 percent stake of Skype as part of the deal. What eBay wanted to do was spin Skype off and sell stock into the business. During their research of spinning Skype an investment group wanted to purchase 65 percent of Skype for about $2 billion in cash. When the founders were told about the plans they filed suit against eBay for copyright infringement. The founders stated that they own the software that runs Skype, which is licensed to eBay under contract. They were claiming that the agreement between them and eBay would be violated if Skype was sold to this investment group. To keep this short, eBay settled because I think they wouldn’t win against the founders of Skype. So that’s why they agreed to give them 14 percent, sell off 56 percent to the investment group, and keep 30 percent for themselves. I think if they would have just brought Skype to the public they could have made a lot more money. The problem with bringing it to the public is reporting. When a company is publicly traded everything needs to be reported, incomes, profit and loss numbers. The way the deal was done nothing needs to be reported.