paidContent.org recently ran a piece on the current licensing dispute between eBay (owner of Skype) and Joltid (licensor of the P2P technology Skype uses).

If you did not know, Skype uses Peer-2-Peer technology as their transport medium of voice and video. I will not use this blog posting to go into the technical and juridical issues about how scary Skype can be.

This court case is extremely serious for Skype, just take a look at the SEC fillings. If you are unfamiliar about SEC, it is the watch dog of the US financial system.

What is interesting to take a look at is The Ecosystem that is flourishing around Skype.

The Ecosystem

As with any popular and well deployed technology, we see a whole Ecosystem flourishing around these services. One thing I have noticed is that companies in The Ecosystem seems to making money both faster and easier than the bearer of The Ecosystem. Especially if the bearer provide it's basic services for free (like Skype, Twitter and Facebook does).

The sum of The Ecosystem (money, employees, additional serivces, etc) are of course higher than The Ecosystem bearer itself. I do not know how many employees Skype has, probably not enough to warrant publishing their phone number on their web page. There are of course other reasons why Skype does not publish a phone number on their web page - they don't even publish a email address to get in touch with them. This is not good for companies that want to do business with Skype. Over the last 3 years I have tried to get in touch with people at Skype on several occations, without getting through. I guess I am stupid for not succeeding. Anyway, that is beside my point.

The point is that if the court will rule in Joltid's favour and Skype need to shut down the service this will hurt a lot of people. I am not very concerned about users not paying to use Skype - these will find other means of communication (hint: there are a lot of free SIP based service providers out there).

What is more problematic is killing off The Ecosystem.

Before proceeding I will admit that my company, Azuralis AS, is a part of The Ecosystem around Skype. We earn money off Skype users by providing a service that is sought after in the part of the market we operate. For us the income of Skype related services are barely enough to cover our costs - but we need it because of customer demand. Our piggybacking on Skype is not paramount - so if Skype have to close down we are not going to be very concerned.

However, companies and private citizens that have invested heavily (time, money & effort) in providing additional Skype related services will hurt. Badly. This is very unfortunate since there is a lot of good ideas and a services coming from these companies and persons.

Some of these make a good living, or welcome extra income, of their service offerings. If Skye closes down - they will also probably have to close down, or at least try to find new income streams. Getting a radical new income stream means that your old client's probably will not be with you. Net result is thus that you basically need to create a whole new service or company. Maybe the people you now work with are not motivated or capable of adapting to a world without Skype.

The Users

As stated above, I am not very concerned about the users (either free-riders or not). Serious users of Skype will find other ways and other offerings even if this is painful at first.

One of the best estimates for number of Skype users are a little over 42 million active users (per April 4th 2009). This makes Skype one of the biggest VoIP providers on the planet.

I have not researched the estimated number of businesses using Skype, but a lot are using Skype in their day to day communication. My sources tells me around 15% is business use. It is interesting when I communicate with C-level executives in companies around the world, very often they propose we use Skype instead of telephone calls (even those who have a reachable sip:-address).

Why do we use Skype - even if we know about the technical and legal flaws? My guess is simply convenience and ease of use. It is also a money saver, but this is secondary to many business users. However, since Skype is the Big Numbers Game, the net spending on telephone services would rise if Skype has to close down.

Back in 2006, Research In Motion (BlackBerry) had some patent problems with a company called NTP. There was some fear that RIM had to close down the BlackBerry serivce. Seen from this side of the pound, the BlacBerry devices had become a crucial part of business communication in the US - so I doubted that a judge would be so blind and demand turning off the BlackBerry network.

The same goes for Skype. Around 17 million users from the American continent (North and South combined). The majority would probably be in the North. If take the 15% number above we get 2,5 million business users of Skype. This is quite a lot of users (back in 2006 RIM had around 3 million users).

In summary I am not very concerned that eBay will have to shut down the Skype service. On the other hand - we are talking about the court system ;-)