Skype Sues PennyTalk Calling Card for Patent infringement
<<<... In one of the most ridiculous things I have seen recently, eBay, the parent company of Skype, has sued IDT over a claimed patent infringement on the PennyTalk calling card. While no details of the lawsuit were released other than PennyTalk is using a 2000 patent of theirs for a "long distance telephone communications system." Now if I am correct PennyTalk is just a prepaid calling card, which is the most basic form of telecommunications service... does Skype have a patent on calling cards? This just smells of abuse of our legal system and is no doubt a tit fo tat retaliatory lawsuit to get revenge on IDT for suing Skype for a VOIP patent infringement issue. While I don't know much about the IDT lawsuit against Skype, I do know that if anyone can claim ownership of VOIP patents, it is IDTs Net2Phone group who was one of the founding fathers of the VOIP business but I can guarantee you that Skype claiming it has patents in the calling card market is just plain ridiculous!
100 Billion Skype-to-Skype Minutes Served
Skype’s 276 million registered users around the world have now talked with one another for more than 100 billion minutes (100,000,000,000) using free Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls since Skype launched in 2003. This mind-boggling number equates to one minute of free talk for every man, woman and child that has ever walked the Earth! To put this into further perspective, Skype has only been in business for about 4.5 years (approximately 2,365,200 minutes). Yet people have used Skype to talk for more than 69,444,444 days (more than 190,258 years). Go back 150,000 years, if a woolly mammoth and a sabre-toothed tiger had started talking for free on Skype, they would still be chatting away today… and with 40,258 years to go! It took McDonald’s nearly 40 years to serve 100 billion hamburgers (from 1955 to 1994). And it’s taken Skype just over four years to hit the 100 billion free minutes mark which is pretty amazing!... more about Skype >>>