The world’s largest online auction site, eBay, has been hit with a massive €1.7 million (USD $2.55 million) fine after the company has failed to adhere to a previous injunction that ruled the company wasn’t doing enough to block the sale of counterfeited Louis Vuitton products.

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eBay is inching closer to selling it’s popular internet telephony service Skype after reaching an agreement with Joltid and Joost M.V. over patent infringement litigation.

The settlement did not come cheap. Skype founders Niklas Zennstorm and Janus Friis have given up a lot of equity, bringing their total stake in the company to 14-percent, in order for Joltid to drop litigation and to pass all rights to the questioned underlying VoIP technologies to Skype.

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eBay announced today the company has bought a controlling 67% stake in South Korea’s largest internet-based marketplace, Gmarket, in a deal worth US $1.2 billion. The deal was approved unanimously across the Gmarket board.

It is highly unlikely eBay will merge Gmarket with its current brands in the region.

eBay CEO John Donahoe said, “The combination of Gmarket and Internet Auction Company establishes an exceptionally strong leadership position for eBay in one of the world’s largest, most dynamic and innovative e-commerce markets,”

It is a good strategic strategy for eBay to try to further establish itself in the emerging and high growth Asian region markets.

The deal will be completed in only a couple of months in June 2009.

eBay has made it clear that they over paid for Skype and the synergies they were hoping for are just not there.

According to comments made today by eBay CEO Tom Donahoe, he said, “it’s clear that Skype has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal. We believe operating Skype as a stand-alone publicly traded company is the best path…”

According to the company, an IPO will be completed by Q2 2010.

Skype currently has more than 400 million global users, and generated $551 million in total revenue in 2008.

eBay’s popular VoIP service Skype has just launched a mobile version of its service for the iPhone. A BlackBerry version will launch by the end of May. It firstly rolled out the iPhone Skype app on Tuesday in Japan (already available in Japan from the time difference) and will also launch tomorrow for everyone else. Reports indicate the sound quality and everything else is great. The apps will be completely free to use and download, but some features such as making calls requires Skype credits. Via

eBayer Jason Hart from Manchester, England, has been sentenced to two years in prison for defrauding eBay buyers about $36,000 between Sept 2006 and April 2007. He sold about 20 Xbox 360 consoles, an assortment of other electronics, event ticks, among other items, and then simply never sent anything. Jason Hart even went as far as calling a local paper telling them he had died. Judge Mr. Justice Everett ultimately sentenced him to 18 months for the fraud and an additional six months for perjury as he lied to the court by saying his mother had died. The judge said, “You put people off in that horrible, cynical fashion, showing just how capable you are of manipulative behavior in a dishonest way.”

Despite slow holiday sales, internet retailer Amazon is reporting strong Q4 profits. The company says total revenue for the period was up 18% to $6.70 billion. Amazon says total revenue would have been up 24% thanks to unfavorable exchange rates. Net profit for Q4 was up 9% to $22 million. The company Founder Bezos also said the company’s ebook reader the Kindle, which has more than 230,000 titles was in “unusually strong” demand during the period.

PayPal is about to support the OpenID platform (see podcast). This is great news for OpenID because having PayPal on board adds credibility to OpenID as PayPal has all that highly sensitive user information. Other key adopters of OpenID include Microsoft, Verisign, Yahoo, IBM, Twitter and Google.

EBay has just released its quarterly Q4 earnings. Revenue was down 6% to $2.04 billion, missing analyst’s expectations of about $2.13 billion. Profits were $367 million ($0.29 per share) in Q4. I definitely don’t think eBay is immune to the financial crisis. With the U.S. in recession, consumer spending down, and sellers taking fewer risks, it should be no surprise here.