IDG News is reporting that Net2Phone has sued eBay and its Skype unit, alleging that they infringed on a patent it obtained in 2000. Net2Phone is seeking a permanent injunction as well as unspecified monetary compensation.
Net2Phone charged eBay and Skype with violating U.S. Patent 6,108,704, which describes a method for establishing a point-to-point communications link between two devices via Internet protocol.
In looking to increase its share of the VoIP market even further, Skype recently announced that it will offer free PC-to-phone calls in the U.S. until the end of 2006. This might have irked Net2Phone, which operates a PC-to-phone call service as one of it's core revenue generators. Skype traditionally focussed on PC-to-PC calls.
While I'm not a patent examiner, this seems strange. Skype has always been a P2P VoIP operator, and indeed hosts a page on it's website where it claims it is better than Net2Phone, because it works through firewalls. It's hard to imagine that the technology Skype uses is identical, although Skype's technology may nevertheless infringe.
[via Engadget]
