Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- The founders of Skype have agreed to join the investor group buying the Internet calling service from EBay Inc., and an announcement may come today, according to people familiar with the matter.

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold Skype to EBay in 2005, will take a stake in the company alongside a group led by private-equity firm Silver Lake, said the people, who declined to be identified because the matter isn’t public. They also will drop lawsuits filed against Skype and the investor group in London, California and Delaware, the people said.

The settlement ends a legal fight that spanned two continents and threatened to shut down Skype. The founders, who own the underlying software code to the Web-calling service, had accused EBay of breaking a licensing deal and sued the investor group in September, claiming damages were growing by $75 million a day.

Index Ventures, which helped orchestrate the deal, will no longer be part of the investor group, the people said. Some minor details of the agreement were being worked out last night, and it’s possible the announcement may still be delayed, the people said.

John Pluhowski, a spokesman for San Jose, California-based EBay, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Joltid Ltd., the company owned by Zennstrom and Friis. A representative for Index Ventures didn’t return a call seeking comment.

EBay rose 69 cents, or 3.1 percent, to $23.24 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock has gained 66 percent this year.

Skype IPO

The fight for Skype has been building for more than a year. Soon after John Donahoe became EBay’s chief executive officer last year, he said he would evaluate whether Skype was a good fit for the company. In April, EBay announced plans to hold an initial public offering for the phone service, saying it had little to do with the online retailer’s other businesses.

Around that time, the battle escalated over the software code that the founders licensed to Skype through Joltid. The pair had accused Skype of altering the code, and Skype sued them in a London court. Skype’s lawyers told the judge that if Joltid’s claims weren’t invalidated, it would be “devastating” to Skype and the company might be forced to shut down.

In September, an investor group led by Silver Lake agreed to buy Skype for about $2 billion. Zennstrom and Friis struck back, filing lawsuits in federal courts in California and Delaware against the group and accusing one member, Michelangelo Volpi of Index Ventures, of stealing company secrets while he was CEO of their Internet-video company Joost NV.

Zennstrom and Friis, who founded Skype in 2003, also created the Kazaa music file-sharing system, which ran on the same software that powers Skype.

2007 Writedown

EBay, under former CEO Meg Whitman, bought Skype with the hope that buyers and sellers would use the phone service to communicate about items for sale. EBay paid $2.6 billion for the company and wrote down its value to $1.2 billion in 2007.

Skype is EBay’s second-most-profitable unit, Donahoe said in an October interview. Its revenue grew 29 percent in the third quarter to $185.2 million and now accounts for more than 8 percent of EBay’s sales. Donahoe said he expects the buyout to close this month.

With 520 million users, Skype handles more than 8 percent of all cross-border voice traffic, making it the top provider of international calls, according to Washington-based research firm Telegeography.

Skype users can call each other for free from computers and mobile phones. Skype makes money when customers use the service to call regular phones. Customers also pay for voicemail, call- forwarding and text-messaging services.

To contact the reporter on this story: Joseph Galante in San Francisco at jgalante3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 5, 2009 16:16 EST