Skype owner eBay is facing litigation from Skype’s original owners and founders contending that eBay only owns a license to use the technology that powers Skype – and that the license has now expired.

The Swedish founders of Skype Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis run a company called Joltid, and say that Skype "should not possess, use or modify certain software source code."

They contend that eBay has disclosed some of that code in US patent cases following US court orders, reports the Guardian, and they now seek to revoke Skype's licence on the basis of copyright infringement and misuse of confidential information.

Ebay is exposed in a major way on this controversy in light of its plans to float Skype next year, and it has been trying to sell the company since the beginning of the year according to the New York Times, with an IPO potentially worth up to $US4 billion.

Ebay paid $US2.6 billion for Skype in 2005 with performance incentives that raised the total to $US3.1 billion (a subsequent writedown of $US1.4 billion was an implicit admission eBay overpaid), but Skype now has 480 million users worldwide, and generated $US170 million in revenue for the second quarter of this year, up 25%.

It gets more convoluted – Messers Friis and Zennström reportedly want to buy back the company, and led a private equity group in making an offer on the company three months ago.

Ebay is now in the process of hastily trying to develop its own peer-to-peer communication software before the case is heard in June 2010 as a possible workaround to try and continue running the Skype service.

In its submission to the Securities and Exchange Commission eBay acknowledged that if it was unsuccessful in developing alternative software, that may result in “loss of functionality or customers even if successful, and will in any event be expensive. If Skype was to lose the right to use the Joltid software as the result of the litigation, and if alternative software was not available, Skype would be severely and adversely affected and the continued operation of Skype’s business as currently conducted would likely not be possible.”

If the company is unsuccessful in developing an alternative, another option could be to simply buy it from someone else like Gizmo, but ReadWriteWeb notes that “The creation of another global P2P VOIP and video network that doesn't infringe on existing patents is no small task.”

One more thing: Skype’s disappearance from the market would leave a huge opportunity for Google to take its Google Voice offering and extend it into the gap, writes Bytesizeupdates.