Attorneys must love the founders of Skype -- Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who filed yet another lawsuit. This one is against the former CEO of Joost, Mike Volpi, as well as Index Ventures. The claim is that the defendants breached their fiduciary responsibilities to Joost by brokering the $1.9 billion buyout of Skype, which is currently owned by eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY). One of the investors in the proposed deal is Index Ventures (and Volpi recently became a partner of the firm).

Keep in mind that on Wednesday, the Skype founders filed a lawsuit -- against eBay, Silver Lake Partners, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board -- for copyright infringement. They believe that their company, Joltid, owns key intellectual property for the Skype platform and that eBay is in violation of the terms.

It's universally believed that eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) overpaid badly for its $3.1 billion acquisition of Skype, a revolutionary online phone company that, regardless of how cool it happens to be, doesn't generate a lot of income or fit with eBay's core business in any meaningful way.

When Meg Whitman retired as CEO, John Donahoe replaced her and has said repeatedly that he is open to selling Skype.

Yesterday, eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) announced that the co-founder and chief executive of its Skype division, Niklas Zennstrom , was stepping down, and that eBay would take $1.43 billion in charges for the internet phone division. Of that, $900 million will be a write-down in the value of Skype, what's called an impairment charge. The rest, $530 million, is payment for certain shareholders to settle future obligations.

Well, well, well. It seems that eBay had finally caught on. Hadn't investors been saying the $2.6 billion Skype acquisition in October 2005 was overvalued from all along?

While Skype was profitable the last two quarters, its contribution to eBay's top line was abysmal considering it was one of three legs eBay was counting on in its Power of Three strategy. The other two being the online auction business, or market place, and PayPal, the online payment service. For 2006, Skype contributed $194 million to eBay's near $6 billion revenue, that's about 3.2%. To give you an idea, market place contributed $4.3 billion and PayPal $1.4 billion. In the first six months of 2007, Skype did better and contributed $168 million or 4.7% to eBay's total revenue of $3.6 billion. Better, and certainly growing nicely (over 100% year-over-year growth), but still a far cry from what it should be considering the price paid.