In their news release, they claimed that the damages “are amassing at a And on Wednesday, they announced they were suing eBay for copyright infringement, and asked for an injunction and damages. Volpi’s conduct during the time he ran theĬompany.

Volpi off the Joost board and announced that Joost was conducting an investigation of Mr. Over the weekend, the Skype founders kicked Mr. They had a good enough relationship that even after he stepped down, he remained chairman.īoy, did I get that wrong. After all, I reasoned, Michelangelo Volpi, who was part of the consortium, had been the chief executive of Joost, a company that had also been started by Mr.

In my column a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that maybe - just maybe - the new owners had some kind of wink-wink-nod-nodĪgreement with the Skype founders.

Willing to spend $2 billion to buy a company that was facing life-or-death litigation? The lawsuit struck me as so serious that when eBay sold 65 percent of Skype recently to a different private equity consortium, I theorized that they probably had an ace up their sleeve. Such a move, if upheld by the courts, would effectively shut down Skype. Time of day is a matter of considerable dispute.) They were also busy suing eBay, claiming that it was using peer-to-peer technology that remained their intellectual property - and which they no longer wished (Whether this was because the bid they made with some private equity partners was too low, or because eBay wouldn’t give them the Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, they were trying to buy back their baby from eBay,

Skype stock option buyback