Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

P2P Scammers' Lawyers Attack Open Source Team

Posted by kdawson on from the worst-are-full-of-passionate-intensity dept.

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."

5 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Turnabout is fair play by abbamouse · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    Make cheese not war 8:)
  2. maybe not accessible ... by Fallen+Andy · · Score: 4, Informative
    ... 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

  3. a quick strings shows they do have the same parent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  4. Typical scammer behaviour by anticypher · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    --
    Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
  5. Re:Reminds me of a story... by paeanblack · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...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.