San Jose State University weighs Skype ban
An effort by San Jose State University to ban the Skype phone service has been put on hold in the face of fierce objections from students and staff. Administrators said they would meet with eBay, the owner of Skype, next Tuesday in order to give the San Jose-based company an opportunity to address the university's concerns about network security. San Jose State is the third California university to impose restrictions on Skype.
n January, the University of California, Santa Barbara announced it was prohibiting Skype because the license agreement it presented to users gave third parties access to the university's network. UC-Santa Barbara said it would allow other computer-calling services.
California State University Dominguez Hills has long discouraged use of all computer-calling services, including Skype, a spokesman said. Skype has also been banned by some universities in the United Kingdom.
Jennifer Caukin, a spokeswoman for eBay, said Skype was looking ``forward to having a direct dialogue with SJSU officials to discuss their concerns and educate them about how Skype works.'' Caukin declined to discuss other bans.
EBay purchased Skype last October in a deal that was then valued at $2.6 billion. The growth of Skype, which is believed to be the world's most popular computer-calling service, has been key to eBay's attempts to persuade people to invest in its future.
As of mid-July, Skype boasted 113 million registered users around the world, an increase of 156 percent from the previous year.
But the value of shares in eBay has fallen 41 percent since January on the fear that the decade-long and world-wide expansion of the online marketplace giant had ended.
Founded by the creators of KaZaA, a controversial file-sharing service, Skype uses peer-to-peer architecture to route free calls between computers. Previously, universities had banned KaZaA, along with sister services like Morpheus, iMesh, Gnutella, LimeWire, Grokster, because they were used to illegally trade online movies and music.
The problem with Skype is not that it enables illegal behavior, but that its end-user license agreement appears to permit legal use of university's networks by people outside the university and, indeed, the United States.
``It's a fairly subtle problem,'' said Kevin Schmidt, campus network programmer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Skype users agree to run an application on their computers that is built to relay calls between third parties whenever a computer is turned on.
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