One of the more wackiest cases to be seen here in a while, the group behind Kazzaa ( Sharman Networks ) was suing the two programmers ( ex-owners of Skype )who wrote their software.
http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Skype_wins_victory_in_US_4b_lawsuit/0,339028227,339273217,00.htm?feed=rssA US court has thrown out a US$4.1 billion lawsuit that was levelled against Skype.
Streamcast Networks, a P2P software vendor, told a Los Angeles court that Skype's owners, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, had illegally taken Streamcast's VoIP technology and used it to create their VoIP company.
Skype has gone on to be one of the world's most successful internet companies, with Zennström and Friis selling it to eBay for US$2.6 billion two years ago.
Streamcast develops and distributes P2P software known as Morpheus, and it has long maintained that it owns the rights to the FastTrack/Kazaa software engine on which Morpheus is based.
The court case -- which saw Streamcast claiming US$4.1 billion in unspecified damages plus a court order blocking eBay from selling Skype's services -- revolved around the involvement of the Skype pair and a long list of other defendants in the development of both Kazaa and VoIP software. Zennström and Friis were active in developing Kazaa shortly after the end of the dot-com boom.
But the federal judge has now rejected the lawsuit, decreeing that Streamcast had failed to prove its case. The judge dismissed all claims against both Skype and all the other defendants.
It seems funny to see the company that bought a licence to sell software from these two programmers, then tries to sue them for something totally unrelated after caving in to the Cartel and settling for 100 Million, perhaps they wanted to take down the programmers intellectual assets to leverage globally.
