P2P Scammers' Lawyers Attack Open Source Team

An anonymous reader writes "Late last year a company affiliated with the French RIAA hijacked the Shareaza.com domain name from the original, open source project's owner. They are passing off their own for-pay software, which violates the GPL, as the real thing. Now, having stolen the Shareaza project's identity, the scammers are threatening legal action to shut down the real open source team."

Re:Interesting move by the French RIAA

[Ice Tiger]

Exactly if Discordia took the source, modified it and do not provide access to it as has been implied then they are far game for a copyright infringement lawsuit. If the original authors don't want to do it then maybe give the copyright to the EFF who WILL go after them. Also maybe drum up some press about the copyright infringement and their link to the French RIAA as that will surely stink PR wise.

Turnabout is fair play

[abbamouse]

Aw, someone stole the Shareaza name and used it for their own proprietary crap. I seem to remember something like this from a few years back, except the term is question was Gnutella and an incompatible protocol stealing its name and calling itself "Gnutella 2." Karma can be a bitch sometimes.

Re:Do better than that

[roman_mir]

However, France is different and I'm not sure about what you are allowed to say legally.

- http://www.shareazasecurity.be/ [shareazasecurity.be] is not French, it's Belgium's and the shysters are from NY.

maybe not accessible ...

[Fallen Andy]

... if you've got Spybot-SD installed then your local hosts file maps shareaza.com along with many other junk sites to 127.0.0.1. (For a moment I thought they'd been slashdotted (grins)).

Andy

a quick strings shows they do have the same parent

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded the exe from shareaza.com and unpacked it (strings showed it was a wise installer, google wise unpack)
strings shareaza.exe gave loads and loads of function names error messages etc.
Downloaded the source from real shareaza (from sourceforge) ran grep against those names and everyone tried matched.
I need to try and do a proper comparasion, but IMHO the exe is created from the a branch of the open source 'true' version

Re:Interesting move by the French RIAA

[Ice Tiger]

It wouldn't be an extensive P2P network if they didn't distribute their client. :)

Anyway after digging around they rebranded their own client they use for their other networks thus didn't violate the GPL at all. Maybe the open source guys can register the name as a trademark and go after them that way.

Typical scammer behaviour

[anticypher]

Although TFA mentions the French equivalent of the RIAA, I'm puzzled at which it could be. Is it the IFPI, or the only group with legal jurisdiction in France, the SNEP? I can't find any other reference to France or French companies.

The original shareaza.com site resolves to an IP address (207.232.22.55) in New York, but listed with a fake front company with an Israeli ISP. The ISPs netvision.net.il and elron.net are known pink-contract, i.e. spammer friendly, hosting companies, they've been known to set up netblocks for spammers and run them until they are in every blacklist, then migrate in another netblock for the spammers. Most of the dodgy hosting is done in the U.S. and Russia. elron.net has been associated with the Russian Business Network, but a quick google doesn't turn up any easy links to back that up.

Someone posted above about shareazasecurity.be (195.47.247.137), but that goes to a server hosted in Denmark.

Although there is some mis-direction by throwing international company names into the mix (a classic scammer tactic), this appears to be mostly a U.S. based operation.

the AC

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[hcmtnbiker]

Mod this parent up he's not a Troll. Mike's Protocol [wikipedia.org] is exactly that. He used the gnutella name as only a means to get people to download his project. It has nothing to do with either gnutella, or the group guiding the original gnutella protocol. Stealing a name is something they've done, just because they're FOSS doesn't meant they're automatically good themselves.

Re:One Way To Easily Defeat French Scammers ...

[sumdumass]

It is ironic that the only connection to oil is also the french's rejection of the war. It has been shown that France has secrete oil deals in violation of UN sanctions worth billions that they stood to lose with an invasion and war in Iraq. It has also been suggested that their chumming with Iraq and their promise of a Veto on a war resolution in the UN was connected to those deals. I can also understand the UN's reaction to us invading around them when the top leaders family was tied in with the French corruption and took part in the Oil for Food scandals first hand.

I'm drawing the connections seeing how we never got any cheap oil from the ordeal, that the only connection to the Iraq war and oil was the corrupt countries who stood to lose by a war and rejection one on those grounds.

So yea, you have been marked funny for your comment. I just think some people don't realize how funny it really it.

Re:Interesting move by the French RIAA

[jrumney]

They don't seem to be distributing the Shareasa client. They seem to be distributing the iMesh client rebadged as Shareasa 4. The only copyright infringement seems to be the use of the Shareasa project's logo on their website. The biggest problem is trademark infringement and passing off, but the former is going to be difficult to pursue without registering the trademark first, which they don't have the money for.

SCPP

[Midnight Thunder]

As many observant /.ers have pointed out, it is not the French RIAA, since the last 'A' is America, and last time I looked France is in Europe (despite some beliefs [youtube.com]). The French equivalent of the RIAA is the SCPP [www.scpp.fr] (Société Civile des Producteurs Phonographiques).

Re:Reminds me of a story...

[paeanblack]

...from a while back in which some hardware counterfeiters in china got to the point where they where actually paying a firm for R&D for new products.

A hundred years ago the same thing was happening here in the US. Intellectual property law enforcement was non-existent in practice. US companies were ripping off European IP and then grew to the point when they needed their own R&D to compete with other US companies doing the same thing. Oddly enough, right about the time when serious commercial research was starting to take off in the States, the US IP laws grew some real teeth.

History is a funny thing. It almost seems like it keeps repeating itself.

page source shows all redirected - shareazaweb.com

[Locutus]

there's nothing on the www.shareaza.com/index.html page referencing page components from the base shareaza.com domain. It's all redirected to shareazaweb.com, a GoDaddy.com registered domain with DNS entries going to Israel.

DNS1=NETVISION.NET.IL
this is all in a hebrew-looking language and unreadable by me

DNS2=ELRON.NET
nowhere did I find in the list of companies they own for IT software does it list Shareaza

Many might already have noticed that Firefox flags this as a possible hijacked site and it sure looks like a strange partnership is behind this. IMO.

raw whois data:

$ whois shareazaweb.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/ [internic.net]
for detailed information.

      Domain Name: SHAREAZAWEB.COM
      Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.
      Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
      Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com/ [godaddy.com]
      Name Server: DNS.NETVISION.NET.IL
      Name Server: NYPOP.ELRON.NET
      Status: clientDeleteProhibited
      Status: clientRenewProhibited
      Status: clientTransferProhibited
      Status: clientUpdateProhibited
      Updated Date: 28-nov-2007
      Creation Date: 22-nov-2007
      Expiration Date: 22-nov-2008

>>> Last update of whois database: Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:28:26 UTC

Re:Is this more Discordian FOSS acquisition?

[OfficeSupplySamurai]

If you go to the actual 7-zip web site [7-zip.org] and look in the right-hand column there is a link to jZip, so it seems highly unlikely that the 7-zip author is unhappy with them.