Skype founders file US suit against eBay

In today's podcast: Skype founders file US suit against eBay; US-EU banking deal sparks controversy; and France considers revised three-strikes Internet law.

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With a similar legal battle playing out in the U.K., a company owned by Skype's founders has filed suit against Skype in the U.S. Joltid, the company owned by Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, filed a copyright infringement suit in California against Skype, eBay, Silver Lake Partners and others. The dispute concerns an agreement that eBay made when it bought Skype in 2005. The acquisition did not include Skype's peer-to-peer networking technology, which is owned by Joltid and was licensed to Skype. Earlier this year Joltid terminated the license agreement. Joltid and Skype have since argued over the validity of the termination in courts in England. Further arguments are scheduled there in the middle of next year.

A new deal being negotiated between E.U. and U.S. authorities to share data from the SWIFT banking network for counter-terrorism purposes was heavily criticized Wednesday for failing to respect European citizens' privacy. The criticism occurred during a debate in the European Parliament. Sweden, holder of the six-month rotating presidency of the E.U., is negotiating an interim agreement to allow the sharing of information about trans-Atlantic financial transactions once SWIFT transfers the data from the U.S. to the Netherlands in the coming weeks. U.S. authorities have mined the database while it has been on their own soil, claiming that the information helped them on more than one occasion to track down a terrorist.

The French government is still pursuing its plan to cut off Internet users accused of copyright infringement -- although a new version of the so-called "three strikes" bill approved by the National Assembly on Tuesday now requires that a court make the decision to suspend a surfer's Internet access. The bill takes its "three strikes" nickname from the three accusations of copyright infringement that must be levelled at surfers before their Internet access is suspended. An earlier version of the law handed the power to disconnect surfers to a newly created High Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet. It was approved by the French Parliament in April but the Constitutional Council struck that measure down as unconstitutional before it was signed into law.

Google plans to accelerate its massive efforts to scan tens of millions of books and periodicals with the acquisition on Wednesday of a company called reCAPTCHA. ReCAPTCHA is a well-known provider of CAPTCHA technology, which is used to prevent spammers from using computers to automatically register for online services, such as webmail accounts and Web site registrations. What attracted Google to ReCAPTCHA is that the company has linked its core authentication service with efforts to digitize print books and periodicals. The search giant has a massive effort underway in that area for its Google Books and Google News Archive services.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.