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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."

5 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Smoking in the licence agreement... by craig1709 · · Score: 5, Funny

    "SMOKING

    Smoking overall is bad for you. It gives you bad breath and may kill you sooner than you'd expect." - the licence agreement
    All I can say is: WTF?

  2. Re:Do better than that by downix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
  3. 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.

  4. 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?

  5. 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