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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."

8 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting move by the French RIAA by downix · · Score: 4, Interesting

    First they work to strengthen copyright laws to the point that they make capital murder seem less a crime, THEN they help a group which targets a GPL piece of software, and as we all know, the GPL utilizes the full strength of Copyright for it's own power... They are about to reap what they have sown.

    --
    Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
    1. Re:Interesting move by the French RIAA by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      First they work to strengthen copyright laws to the point that they make capital murder seem less a crime, Stupid move. So, if you're accused of violating some copyright, maybe killing a lawyer or 2 may get out of the original charge (for lack of "witnesses"...), and you'll be stuck with the lesser charge of capital murder...

      THEN they help a group which targets a GPL piece of software, and as we all know, the GPL utilizes the full strength of Copyright for it's own power... Well, the only trouble is that the shysters didn't violate copyright law, but rather trademark law. These are not the same thing, (un)fortunately.
  2. Re:Do better than that by FictionPimp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You would think an offical post of "Let's not stoop to their level and DoS attack" would be enough. I see no reason to remove the posts. However, France is different and I'm not sure about what you are allowed to say legally. I wonder how this differs from say making a post on my blog that encourages people to go to theaters and yell "fire"

  3. Darn, now I have to RTFA by sm62704 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Late last year a company affiliated with the French RIAA hijacked the Shareaza.com domain name from the original

    The French "Recording Industry Association of America? WTF?

    Kdawson, please have some more coffee before you "edit" the next story, ok?

    --
    mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
  4. its happened before on a grander scale.. by apodyopsis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    NEC - yes thats right the major international corp. - found a entire fake NEC outfit working in China, complete with factories, hundreds of employees, using the same logo, letterheads and even staff ID badges. They found out when kit started coming back for repair that they had not even made. its still one of my favorite China fake goods stories, because you just could not make it up.

    Think I'm joking? I assure you I am not, here are some references...
    http://www.eetindia.co.in/ART_8800416910_1800007_NT_5c0424e2.HTM
    http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187200176
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/technology/01pirate.html
    http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/slick-pirates-seize-entire-brand/2006/05/29/1148754904830.html

    The hardest thing is sometimes to persuade people that what they are doing in actually wrong in the first place, I guess this is the case with Shareaza.

  5. Is this more Discordian FOSS acquisition? by srck · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A quick google for "Discordia Limited" turned up jzip.com - "Based on 7-Zip technology by Igor Pavlov" is the strap line for the site (its a Winzip-style compression tool). Is this another occurrence of their appropriation of open source products?

  6. Re:maybe not accessible ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    firefox also pops up a warning that http://www.shareaza.com/ is a 'suspected web forgery' / phishing site. nice.

  7. Re:direct link by Loke+the+Dog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yes, exactly.

    History of the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet:

    When it was first published in 1830 by Lars Johan Hierta, it was a tabloid that reported news and also criticised the new Swedish king Charles XIV John. The king stopped Aftonbladet from being printed and banned it, this was answered by starting the new newspaper "Det andra Aftonbladet" (The second Aftonbladet), which was subsequently banned, followed by new versions named in similar fashion until the newspaper had been renamed 26 times, after which it was allowed by the king. [1]

    Kinda similar.