You may have heard that eBay’s attempt to sell Skype (at a 50% discount on the purchase price they paid to acquire it) is at risk because of serious IPR problems between eBay, Skype and the founders of Skype.
In essence, it appears that when Skype was sold to eBay, the rights to the underlying technology (peer-to-peer, originally used in fileshares like Kazaa) were not included.
So, after the original sale, Skype did no longer own its own technology, but had to obtain a license from the original founders, who managed to retain the core IPRs of the Skype technology outside the scope of the deal.
The founders are now asking eBay to take into account that they actually own the original IPRs.
Sounds like they want to cash in a second time.
As if there was a need to re-state how important Intellectual Property Rights are in today’s world, think about how you would feel if you paid more than 4 billion dollars, but forgot to check if you actually obtained clear and valid title to the most important asset of a technology business: its core IPRs.
Know what you have, know what you buy, know what you sell – here’s the challenge for a lot of technology companies.
The only way to do this, is by understanding how the innovation is covered by the different tools provided by Intellectual Property Rights, and to properly integrate this into the business model.
Joren