Streamcast sues Skype — and Draper is an investor in the middle

lawsuit

StreamCast Networks, the company that made Morpheus peer-to-peer software, has sued Skype and its two founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

The suit was discovered over the weekend by a guy named Andy Abramson. The story is complex. Remember, the Skype co-founders were running around Europe as it was, trying to avoid being hunted down by American recording executives mad as hell about their previous company, Kazaa, and wanting to serve them lawsuits.

Streamcast is upset that the Skype guys didn’t sell them the technology from that previous company, Kazaa, before spinning it off into Sharman Networks. Streamcast says they had a deal that gave them first dibs should Kazaa sell the technology to anyone else. Streamcast says the Kazaa technology is now part of Skype.

Seems like the only guy who is not getting sued is Tim Draper, venture capitalist at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. An affiliate fund of his, Timberline, invested in Streamcast Networks, and Draper later invested in Skype, and was a major shareholder — and so imaginably had quite a bit of oversight into the strategy of both companies. Timberline had two board members on Streamcast’s board. But we note that Timberline’s Web site is no longer up.