Skype slapped with lawsuit over network structure

Had a good Christmas? Don’t mention it in front of Skype, though. Because while you were hogging sweets, tearing up presents and going “nintendo 644444″ over them, Skype on the other hand were slapped with a big fat lawsuit. The timing couldn’t have been more cruel, the popular service just had a major outage that caused millions of call data loss, and it was one of the reasons why Gradient Enterprises, the plantiff, sued the company.

Gradient claims copyright infringement of their patent, a no. 7,669,207 in the US, according to TechCrunch, entitled ”METHOD FOR DETECTING, REPORTING AND RESPONDING TO NETWORK NODE-LEVEL EVENTS AND A SYSTEM THEREOF”.

Here is a short summary of the patent:
“A system for detecting, reporting and responding to network node-level occurrences on a network-wide level includes one or more first mobile agents, each of the one or more first mobile agents is hosted by one of a plurality of nodes in the network.

An event detection system communicates network event information associated with an event detected at one or more of the nodes in the network to the one or more first mobile agents, and a reporting system disseminates from the one or more first mobile agents information describing the detected event to one or more other nodes.”

What Gradient claims is that Skype uses a network infrastructure they say they invented. The structure allows network monitoring and security software that works in a decentralized way. For technically-illiterate, it may sound vaguely familiar if you had read about Skype’s supernodes, but the argument is as frivolous as it can get, as the patent only allows rights to most decentralized network monitoring tools.

People just love to sue.

Source: Tech Crunch.