Skype is no stranger to patent litigation. One time, even its founders pursued a lawsuit against it. But this is a new lawsuit, not yet reported as far as I can tell. What's more it was filed in the U.S. on May 10, 2011—the same day that Microsoft announced its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype. The case is Via Vadis Vs. Skype (embedded below) and was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia. Via Vadis is a Luxembourg-based company with a license to the patents in question. The patents describe data management systems which break up files for redundancy and distribute them across different "storage units." The lawsuit claims the patents cover the same technology Skype uses for its "supernodes"—which function as fallback peers in Skype's peer-to-peer technology.