SAN FRANCISCO — EBay has formally settled the litigation around its sale of the Skype online calling service.
The founders of Skype, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, will drop their lawsuits against the company and a consortium of buyers whose bid to purchase 65 percent of Skype was announced last month, according to an announcement released
by eBay before the opening of the stock markets Friday.As part of the complex agreement, the founders will own a 14 percent stake in the new Skype and receive two seats on the board.
EBay’s share of the new Skype will fall to 30 percent, and the buyers consortium will now own 56 percent of the company. The founders will also transfer the disputed intellectual property owned by their company Joltid, which was at the heart of the legal battle, over to Skype.
“Skype will be well positioned to move forward under new owners with ownership and control over its core technology,” said John J. Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, in the statement. “At the same time, eBay continues to retain a significant stake in Skype and will benefit from its continued growth. We look forward to closing the deal and focusing on growing our core e-commerce and payments businesses.”
As reported earlier this week, Index Ventures, which had played a key role in organizing the buyout bid for the calling service, and whose role was central in the litigation spawned by the sale, has left the deal altogether. In a statement announcing the deal, Danny Rimer, a partner at Index, said that “the deal terms changed for Index such that it no longer matches our investment criteria, and thus we have decided not to participate in the transaction.”
As part of the settlement, the Skype founders received a 10 percent share of the new Skype, and they also paid $83 million for another 4 percent of the company. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.
“Everything is settled and aligned,” said Marc Andreessen, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which contributed $50 million to the buyout. “There’s been a lot of drama but fundamentally it is still a good deal.”
Skype allows its 520 million registered users to make free calls to one another using their computers or mobile devices that run Skype software, and it charges low rates to call regular phones. Skype brought in $185 million for eBay in the last quarter and was the fastest-growing part of its business. Despite the dispute surrounding the sale, users of the service will not be affected by the transition.
The settlement caps almost a year of hardnosed and clever maneuvering by the Skype founders. The pair first bid to buy Skype back from eBay almost a year ago, putting up hundreds of millions of their own money alongside cash from several private equity funds, including Elevation Partners in Silicon Valley.
The Skype founders, according to a person familiar with that deal, had ambitious plans to free Skype from the demands of short-term financial performance and to concentrate on expanding the service on mobile phones and in the developing world.
EBay, however, did not respond to their bid, and the founders resorted to litigation to scare away other potential buyers. In a lawsuit filed in March in a British court, they said eBay had violated the copyright to the underlying source code of Skype’s peer-to-peer network, owned by Joltid, another company they controlled.
EBay did not purchase this part of the Skype technology in 2005 because the Skype founders, and Joltid’s other shareholders, were asking for additional hundreds of millions, and stated that they intended to use the technology for other unrelated ventures, like their video startup Joost.
EBay was also promised a long-term license to the Joltid technology, and at the time, Mr. Zennstrom was committed to staying on as Skype’s chief executive. He left in 2007.
Things got even more complicated last month when the founders’ legal ploy appeared to fail. EBay announced it was selling Skype to a rival consortium, organized by Index Ventures and led by Silver Lake Partners, another Silicon Valley private equity firm. The deal came together partly because one partner at Index Ventures, Michelangelo Volpi, who had worked for the Skype founders at Joost, was confident he could extricate Skype from the Joltid technology.
Threatening to scuttle the deal, the founders then sued eBay and the buyers in two American courts, alleging copyright infringement and saying Mr. Volpi was unfairly using confidential information to complete the transaction.
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