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."

Comments

Re:direct link

[Plunky]

I should say, that the comments that the lawyers were objecting to was a thread regarding setting up the real shareaza program to query the www.shareaza.com site in order to perform a distributed denial of service attack on it and put it under.

Of course, suggesting any such thing must be illegal, and organising such an attack even in retaliation is not going to be good for your karma.

IMHO they should just have changed the name of the program and got a new domain name

Not so black & white

[LilWolf]

While the company may violate the GPL, their legal note says they want some threads removed from the forum that contain instructions on how to conduct an DoS attack against them. That may or may not be illegal where you live, but in no case does it gather sympathy from me.

If they're violating the GPL then sue them for that, but don't complain if they come at you for something that's likely illegal where ever you live.

Do better than that

[roman_mir]

Warning to Shareaza users by the original team:

ShareazaV4, is totally fake. It violates the open-source license, GPL (Version 2) in many ways. Also, it isn't free nor open source. It requires a subscription and installs a suspicious toolbar. You can read what happened from this reference list: http://tinyurl.com/2cx7ff

Please, update your Shareaza version to Shareaza 2.3.1.0, and change the site from Shareaza.com to the new official site at Sourceforge: http://shareaza.sourceforge.net/ .

The short version of why this is happening from the article:

A company trying to pass itself off as vendors of the open-source file-sharing software Shareaza, has set the legal dogs on the real Shareaza forum. Discordia Ltd, who earlier turned Bearshare and iMesh into pay services, demanded action after a member of the real Shareaza forum suggested a DOS attack on the site.

This is due to this suggestion by real shareaza forum user :

Make it so the real shareaza program queries their site [shareaza.com] every couple of seconds. As an individual user this won't take much personal bandwidth. But all shareaza users worldwide put together should be enough to kill their server and they won't really be able to do much since it will be coming from so many different IPs.

The letter by the shyster hired by the thief/impersonator of the shareaza domain and project:

This law firm represents Discordia, Ltd., the operator of the website Shareaza.com and owner of the rights in the Shareaza branded software distributed from that domain. Please be advised, that your forum contains a string of posts under the title: "suggestion to kill Shareaza.com." Under the string, the poster, RedSquirrel offers directions for users of Shareaza software to implement a DoS that would have the effect of destroying or seriously impairing our client's application and network. The poster OldDeath also offers a manner to illegally attack our client's business.

Despite whatever complaints your forum's users may have with our client's proper and legal business activities, the type of activity promoted on your forum is illegal. Therefore, we request that you immediately remove this string of posts and any future strings of this nature. My client respects your users' rights to express their points of view. However, the line is crossed when users begin to promote the destruction of a legitimate business (evidently based on out some misguided belief that artists and others who create music should not be fairly compensated for their efforts) via illegal or other predatory means.

If the above cited illegal activity on your site does not immediately cease and desist, our client will take all necessary action to vigorously and relentlessly protect its rights. To be clear, if this action is not immediately taken and, as result, our client's business is harmed, we will not only pursue, locate and hold fully responsible each and every one of those who have implemented this, or any similar DoS, but also those responsible for maintaining your site and the forums.

Please confirm that the requested action is being taken immediately.

Jeffrey A. Kimmel

Meister Seelig & Fein, LLP
140 E. 45th St., 19th Fl.
New York, NY 10017
(212) 655-3578

I suppose the law is in their hands in terms of a DDoS attack, so it would be more correct to sue the impersonator/thief for t

Re:Do better than that

[downix]

To claim that forum trolls represent a project is a weak tactic, and had been thrown out of court in every case I have studied.

Re:Do better than that

[ArsenneLupin]

I suppose the law is in their hands in terms of a DDoS attack, so it would be more correct to sue the impersonator/thief for trademark and copyright violations if they indeed are violating the GPL and are using 'shareaza' name on their 'competing' software. It's not actually a DDoS attack, but rather millions of shareaza instances probing the shareaza site for updates. A thing many other software packages (such as virus scanners, or even Windows itself) do routinely. The shareaza authors are perfectly within their rights to do this. Too bad only that somebody hijacked the shareaza domain, and that the relevant URL didn't contain the appropriate CGI to manage the update, and even less the needed cryptographic signatures to validate itself. Too bad also that shareaza probes again real soon after a failure, and only a day after a success.

Oh, and Meister Seelig needs to be very careful where he steps, so that he doesn't accidentally perjure himself by claiming rights that his clients doesn't have... In his first letter he seems to have avoided the obvious traps (... simply by not using the term "under penalty of perjury ...) but I'm sure that as soon as the action starts, and more letters become necessary, he will end up making a mistake.

The appropriate reaction to such a letter is to ask the shyster lawyers whether they are ready to uphold their claims under oath in front of a court of law...

Re:Do better than that

[roman_mir]

1. Noone is complaining about the money part of this, GPLed software can be sold.

2. Installing a suspicious toolbar has nothing to do with the GPL, but it does so under the disguise of the 'real' Shareaza project. This casts a shadow and causes problems to the real project.

3. DDOS attack is not necessary in this case, only a copyright / trademark lawsuit is necessary, but if a DDOS will make the thief/impersonator suffer in this case it is a good thing, it provides moral support to the real project's people. I would feel righteous helping in that even if legally I would be in the wrong.

4. The impersonator relies on the name of the known free software to get an easy access to market, that is why the impersonator acquired the domain (by whatever means) and maintains the name of the application. This is done to fool someone into believing that they are getting the 'real' project's software of-course. It is the impersonator who must give up the name, not the original project.

5. This is a GPL violation, but it is not the only problem here. The problem is using someone elses name to commit what ammounts to fraud.

6. Back at you.

Re:direct link

[Calinous]

And see history repeating itself? Create a new name for their program and promote it, only to lose it after a while?

Re:direct link

[Brian Gordon]

Oh yeah, they get their domain name illegally hijacked so they should just change the name of their entire project.

"turnaboutisfairplay"? Get a clue.

[Anonymous Coward]

People saying this is fair game since P2P software can be used for piracy are completely failing at understanding the issues here. P2P software can be used for legal file sharing - we do it all the time with Linux distributions. I used to use Shareaza's bittorrent client for exactly that while in Windows. Not all use of Shareaza is illegal, but violating the GPL is ALWAYS illegal if that's what happened. Passing your product off as someone else's product, filling it with spyware, and stealing their domain is also surely illegal.

Re:sue em

[Klaus_1250]

I think they should start by getting their domain-name back, filing a complaint with WIPO should set that in motion. Pretty sure they stand a decent chance. The only issue is that Shareaza misses someone with a getting-the-job-done hands-on mentality which can pretty much be seen in the Shareaza client. Poor ed2k support, minimal bittorrent support, problematic Gnutella-support, no continued development of G2, ...

Re:Interesting move by the French RIAA

[SharpFang]

Exactly if Discordia took the source, modified it, distributed it and...

Don't skip that step. You're allowed to make GPL into closeware ("nobody but me is allowed to use it"), but you can't distribute it to others without sources.

What GPL code are they using?

[Skapare]

What GPL code are they using? Are they actually using some identifiable GPL code in their distributed software without complying with the GPL licensing requirements? Are they using the original SHAREAZA team's actual software (modified to do the nasty things)? All I see in the article are issues regarding an allegation of a stolen domain and an allegation of a plot to perform a distributed denial of service attack. If they did in fact make any use of GPL software without complying with the GPL licensing (such as making the source code available to anyone they distribute the software to), then by all means pursue legal remedies for that. Otherwise, the standing issues are the stolen domain and DDoS plot.

Re:direct link

[fugue]

Never confuse legal/illegal with right/wrong. See also "civil disobedience".

But be willing to submit to the punishment meted out by the people with the guns, and good luck getting CNN to pay attention to a protest that depends on an informed, educated, politically active electorate (or whatever).