Shareaza takes the fight to Discordia

p2pnet news | P2P:- Yesterday, at the end of our re-run on FileShareFreak’s RIAA: Three Down, Limewire to Go story, with Shareaza front and centre, “Note - interesting stuff in the works,” p2pnet said. “Stay tuned.”
And here it is:
The Shareaza team is taking on Discordia, the company which hijacked Shareaza, wrongly believing to get away with bare-faced, blatant corporate theft, all you need is the Big 4, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG behind you.
shareaza.com is now a SCAM site he shareaza.com site was taken by scammers, always get Shareaza from http://shareaza.sourceforge.net/
That’s what you still see at sourceforge because Shareaza.com is still under the control of iMesh/MusicLab LLC, “an unauthorized Madison Avenue (New York) based company, with servers in Israel,” as TorrentFreak described it last Christmas, going on:
“MusicLab LLC previously acquired iMesh.com and Bearshare/Bearflix.com following lawsuits. It now appears the known scamsite Shareazaweb.com was a placeholder for the planned takeover of Shareaza, relating to another ongoing lawsuit.
“It is urgent that people understand the software on these iMesh/MusicLab sites is suspicious, misrepresented, and illegal -breaking GPL and DMCA among other laws.”
Maintained by volunteers
Shareaza is one of the oldest multi-network p2P file-sharing clients supporting Gnutella2, Gnutella, eDonkey2000 (eMule), HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent protocols in C++, MFC and ATL, for Windows, p2pnet posted when news of the theft first broke.
We went on: “Developed by Michael Stokes, what makes it unusual is: it’s free software licensed under the GNU General Public License and since 2004, has been maintained by a group of volunteers.”
Now, “”As you will remember, our project’s identity was appropriated late last year by the recording industry funded Discordia Ltd. shell company and handed over to the recording industry ‘approved’ iMesh for commercial exploitation,” says Shareaza in an email, going on >>>
To that end, we are today announcing that we have legal representation and will be contesting the trademark application on our name and identity taken out by Discordia Ltd. After that, we’ll be looking to get our old domain back from the people who threatened, bullied and intimidated the team member holding it on the project’s behalf and who are now using as the gateway to their deceptive business model.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Software Freedom Law Centre, the EFF and Richard Stallman for their help and assistance in this unfortunate matter and also for their recognition of this new threat being faced by free software projects the world over.
If you’d like to help us in our fight to regain control of our identity, we welcome all donations to our Legal Defense Fund. You can use our ChipIn account here [http://shareaza.chipin.com/shareaza-support-fund] to donate safely.
So will this all be long, drawn out and very boring? Quite possibly. Are we going to sit back, lick our wounds and wait for the lawyers to sort it all out?
Heck no!
In fact, The Shareaza Development team is also announcing today that we’ve started work on Shareaza 3.0. Put simply, we’re not going to let the identity thieves slow us down at all.
Shareaza 3.0 will be a significant milestone in Shareaza’s long history.
For a start we’re switching to the brand new QT 4.4 application development framework. This will allow us a lot more flexibility for a redesign of Shareaza’s network core, making the current Gnutella, Gnutella2 and ED2K networks more modular.
We’re also getting rid of the deprecated MFC code to make 3.0 more plug-in friendly and many of the existing features our users know and love will also be re-built with portability in mind.”
Libtorrent libraries
Nor is that the end of it.
“The even bigger news is that we’re scrapping our current implementation of BitTorrent and will be using the libtorrent libraries as our base for torrent support in the 3.0 release,” says the development team, adding >>>
Shareaza’s BitTorrent implementation is long overdue for a revamp and while many of it’s features were revolutionary at the time (Shareaza was the first client to experiment with decentralized torrents for example) the development team realizes that its time to bring BT support into line with the modern torrent scene.
Developers with some spare time and a desire to get their hands dirty playing with the new QT 4.4 on an existing code base are welcome to stop by our developers IRC channel [link] for a chat.
Once again, we send our thanks all the Shareaza users and supporters out there and invite Discordia, iMesh and the recording industry monopoly to drop the trademark application and return our domain name before you embarrass yourselves any further. We’re fighting back!
Way to go, guys
Definitely stay tuned.
(Thanks, Alex)
.
.Stumble It!
p2pnet - RIAA ‘assimilation agenda’, May 9, 2008
Subscribe
to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.phpNet access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.


p2pnet - rss feed: 

May 10th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Has no one made a complaint for misleading consumers with false advertising to the relevant federal dept ?
I remember some time ago a scam site was told in no uncertain terms is was in breach of the law, anyone know if this route is worth pursuing ?
May 10th, 2008 at 10:07 am
I am glad to see they are fighting back. I hope they kick as*!!