The ultimate Skypesquat

Quite some time ago I wrote about companies using Skype, and in using Skype myself I have occasionally come across both other interesting (and apparently legitimate) company affiliations as well as users claiming to be various celebrities. I always assumed, however, that Skype had locked down most corporate names for future use, or at least to prevent people squatting. I assumed this would be even more important to Skype now that it is presumably drafting its B2B/B2C/C2B strategies for integration within eBay.

Well, it would appear that I was wrong. A Palladium Class mega-uber value reader writes in with the following news. He simply did Bloomberg lookups of companies, took their names of official corporate registration (for example, "Nike Inc."), and created Skype IDs for a lot of global household consumer names. [By the way, he stresses this was an experiment - he is not trying to hold anyone to ransom.] But, alas, it gets worse. In his own words:

"Ebay may have paid $4.1bn for Skype but I got 'Skype_Technologies_SA' for free. So pleased was I with this triumph that I also picked up 'Ebay_Inc'!"

Oh dear.