Streamcast Continues Uphill Battle: Sues Joost For The Sins Of Its Founders

Legal Issues

from the yeah,-good-luck-with-that... dept

A year ago, we had the story of the fascinatingly bizarre lawsuit from Streamcast, makers of the Morpheus file sharing system, against Skype and its founders. You can read all the details at that link, but the short version is that Skype’s founders had originally founded Kazaa and licensed the technology to Streamcast — and Streamcast claims the deal included a provision that would give them the chance to buy Kazaa’s technology before anyone else did. The founders later sold off Kazaa to someone else, and moved on to start Skype. Streamcast, however, claims that Janus Friis and Niklas Zenstromm didn’t actually sell off the core technology, and, in fact, used it as a part of Skype — which they later sold to eBay for a few billion — which Streamcast claims they deserve a piece of. A few months ago a judge completely tossed out the case. However, Streamcast is apparently appealing, and to make matters even more fun, it’s adding Friis and Zenstromm’s new startup, Joost, to the list of defendants. The chances of this getting anywhere seem somewhere between slim and none, but it’s not like Streamcast has much else to do these days.