Skype Journal is reporting that Skype’s lawyer Seema Sharma has emailed Jan Geirnaert on Friday, telling him that his blogs skype-watch and skype-gadgets put him in legal jeopardy. The email prompted a quick compliant response from Jan who took both of his blogs offline.
Jan is an independent IT consultant, who has been working with Skype-affiliated companies, and covered Skype related news on his blog since the past two years. Robert Scoble has come up in favor of Skype commenting that:
…they need to protect the trademarks otherwise they’ll lose them…
He however thinks that a better option would have been to enter into a licensing deal with the blogger for using the “Skype” trademark in his blog URL.
Sam Sethi over at Vecosys has other views:
Depending on how Skype manage this in the next few weeks will determine my view on whether I switch to another provider.
This is not the first time a multi-billion dollar company is using heavy handed tactics against a small guy. Alexa gathered a lot of bad PR, when they filed a lawsuit against Alexaholic founder Ron Hornbaker for infringing Alexa’s trademarks. Many bloggers criticized Alexa for handling the case insensitively and Mashable even started a petition to generate support for Hornbaker. Things however took another twist when reports surfaced that Hornbaker is a convicted extortionist.
Skype Journal, the blog that broke this news, has placed itself in a tricky position because they are guilty of the exact same crime, i.e infringing Skype’s trademark.
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