A unit of India's Ybrant Digital Ltd. has filed for chapter 11 protection to deal with a $36.6 million loss in a legal fight over its acquisition of the Lycos search engine, Nasdaq reported yesterday. Ybrant Media Acquisition Inc. will be looking for financing or a settlement to pay the court-ordered award to South Korea's Daum Global Holdings Corp., which had sold Lycos to Ybrant in 2010, according to court papers filed late Monday. The filing stalls action by Daum, which is poised to take control of Ybrant's 56 percent ownership stake in Lycos Inc., through a receivership petition. The bankruptcy proceeding is the latest development in the saga of Lycos, one of the earliest search engines and Web portals, created from research at Carnegie Mellon University in the mid-1990s and now a far-distant competitor of Google.
