P2P Client Does a Deal With the Devil
Written by enigmax on March 10, 2009The name Discordia Ltd is connected to the neutering, hijacking, faking and commercialization of several P2P clients including iMesh, Bearshare and Shareaza.com. Following initial reports that the company had hijacked the Lphant client, it now seems that the business simply sold out to the music industry.
Regular readers will be familiar with Discordia Ltd, the company responsible for the commercialization of iMesh and Bearshare, and the shocking hijacking of the previous official Shareaza website at Shareaza.com. It is far from cut and dried who Discordia are since the company has taken steps to hide who and what it is, but now it seems increasingly likely that the elements of the music industry are behind the operation.
During the last few days, we received a flurry of emails from people worried about the BitTorrent and eD2K-compatible Lphant P2P client. The vast majority of readers won’t know or care about Lphant, and that’s understandable but most will probably be concerned when they discover that along with a steady stream of other P2P software, it has been taken over – backed by elements from the music industry.
As with the takeovers of iMesh, Bearshare and the Shareaza.com website (and the faking of their client), Discordia has cleverly replaced the original P2P clients with one of its own – one which neuters the content previously available (via now-dead inbuilt BitTorrent or eD2K functionality) and provides its own, DRM-ridden and filtered content. On the Lphant site, the ‘new’ client offered is the same as that offered on the iMesh, Bearshare and the (fake) Shareaza.com sites – the old clients in each case have been killed off.
So did Discordia hijack Lphant in the same way as they did Shareaza.com? It seems not. It is unclear if the developer of Lphant did a willing deal with Discordia or if the deal was a pressured settlement, but a deal was definitely done.
Enter ‘Merlin Network’. According to its own website, Merlin Network is “a non-profit organization charged with representing independent music companies in enhancing the commercial exploitation of their copyrights on a global basis,” and it has just done a deal with the iMesh service. The deal adds music from the likes of Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand, not for free but on via iMesh’s subscription service.
So where does Lphant fit into the picture? It appears that US-based iMesh wants to expand its services into Europe. To facilitate this expansion it has bought (maybe acquired via ’settlement’) Spain-based Lphant, castrated the client, and relaunched it as a ‘licensed’ music service.
What this means is that Merlin’s member labels music – which they claim represent some 9% of the total US music business – will be available across all of the Discordia-linked applications including iMesh, Bearshare and both the fake Shareaza and Lphant clients.
In a statement, Merlin CEO Charles Caldas said, “We are pleased that iMesh inherently recognized the value of the Merlin repertoire in expanding their footprint to the global market, and are happy to be involved in working with them to license and legitimize the Lphant P2P network. It shows again that the tremendous efficiency and global reach that Merlin provides those wishing to license the world’s most exciting and commercially valuable independent repertoire has been recognized.”
In October 2008, along with Universal, Sony BMG, EMI, Warner Music Group and The Orchard, Merlin announced it had done a distribution deal with Spotify. Unlike Spotify, however, Discordia does not have a good reputation and has showed with its abuse of Shareaza.com that it has no qualms about using underhand tactics in pursuit of its goals.
Other P2P client developers should watch their backs – unless future assimilation into the Discordia collective sounds attractive.
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49 Responses
i never trusted any of the above.
especially not bearshare, never was there a serious filesharer to use it.
i’m a little surprised by Lphant it was a pretty good client
simple un-real….buncha sell out fucks
Guess this means more people are just gonna flock over to Frostwire and uTorrent… not such a bad thing really.
Never really heard of Lphant, not the point I know but we always knew Discordia was a pack of scum from the “Shareaza incident”.
Discordia is against freedom. This is obvious, but this obvious fact can never be repeated too many times. To side with Discordia is to be against freedom, and thus is to be against all pirates. Pirates of the world, unite!
lol, isohunt and utorrent 4life ;)
Damn discordians again.
Why, can’t they just leave stuff alone?
It’s not like they haven’t already polluted the collected interwebs enough.
ffs, music industry spending millions yet again.
if piracy is so bad for their business then WHY THE F### do they have seemingly limitless funds to do half this nonsense.
@4 +1!!!!!!!!!!!!
ITS OVER 9000!!!!!!
This really sucks, they’re ruining the word “discordia”. Before this, anything using the word discordia meant absolute freedom, Robert Anton Wilson style.
A pox on Discordia Ltd, for they are not true followers of our goddess.
They are but faux discordians, soldiers of order, the demonic hordes of Lexx Luther.
They like others will fall before mighty Entropy.
Eros be praised.
“Discordia Ltd.” is just another Cypress shell company for “iMesh Inc.” -Which was a new company based in Sony’s New York offices after the takeover of old iMesh. (Although a dozen employees still work at the old Israeli location.)
Stop spreading corporate FUD!!! – The enemy has a face and it’s on Facebook: Search Talmon Marco (Robert Summer is merely his overlord.)
Neither God, nor angels, or just men can command you to pay for the beauty that is music.
Therefore it is your solemn and imperative duty to use every means, both moral, intellectual, digital, and physical to share that beauty.
Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your freedoms and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let every man throughout the world do this, and the days of digital slavery are numbered. You cannot be more resricted than you have been – you cannot suffer more advertising than you have already. Remember that you are MILLIONS!”
Pinealists, the lot of ye!
another good reason to shun people that use spotify
Next eMule release will probably ban the hell out of Lphant as a result of this, although maybe the older versions will be accepted because it seems as if the hijacking doesn’t begin until the “new” client. Open source is the way to go (Common uTorrent!) with this stuff or these companies will just keep getting their software taken from them.
Don’t respond often but felt the need!
It occurs to me that because they can’t shut the pirates down fully, there gonna pull a Bill Gates, i.e. Buy up what they can and stick a universal name to it, in Bill Gates case it was Microsoft. I have the greatest admiration for Bill he was an inspired business man, he saw how to exploit something he couldn’t do to earn him money.
The MPAA & RIAA etc are going the same route they can’t/don’t know how/why to do the same but for money so F*** IT buy it & charge!
The little guys will succumb I’m afraid, Take TPB, they have taken a great moralistic stand up to now but at the end of the day flash enough cash and who knows! I really hope not but history goes round & round. Just look at electricity, telephone etc the ORIGINAL pioneers were usurped by others.
*raises fist in a “tabloid style” rage*
@16 Mremixer
I don’t think so, they can buy up all they want, I wouldn’t pay, I’d just go to the next free p2p that pops up and so will everyone else. They will eventually run out of money.
The Bear is not dead,
you just need to be careful when you use or feed it.
@7: I wondered the same thing. Oh wait! Maybe THIS is what they meant by piracy costing the industry billions. Not billions in lost sales but in fruitless efforts at dousing their competition.
You people are all just WRONG!
….
I don’t really know what the problem is with you people: after purchase by Discordia the other clients improved significantly and I see no reason why this won’t happen with LPhant.
Looking forward to a bright future for this thing :)!!
@23: It’s almost hard too hard to tell deadpan sarcasm from desperate iMesh employees.
@23: Fuck you and your lies, troll.
For any people who have previously used Shareaza but for some reason have not found the new site, it is http://www.pantheraproject.net/
bearshare…is OK, if you still have the older versions available (oldversion.com) though it is true that the first results you get usually are spam (the D**N r**a and m**a) trying to pollute those networks. Blah.
You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
obvious sllorts is obvious ;)
I just want to point out that the real Shareaza still exists and can be found at http://www.pantheraproject.net/
It is my fovorite p2p client for music and stuff that can’t be found in torrents. It does support torrents too. With more support shareaza could actually be better than any other program. As it is, it uses 3 different networks (gnutella1, gnutella2, and emule) plus can download torrents too (though not as well as utorrent). The combination of utorrent for some things and shareaza for others just kicks butt.
Hail Eris!
All Hail Discordia!
Eris appeared before me, and spake, saying “At the end of all time,
all the peoples of Earth will descend into the fiery pit of hell.”
And I asked, “Will following your commandments prevent this?” And
Eris spake again, saying “No.”
And I didst weep, for I knew then that I was doomed.
And Eris spake again, saying “Only kidding! I made that up.” I didst
say, “What?”
But Eris was gone, and I drunk from the Tequila bottle once again.
Fnord.
just don’t use closed source software and you should be fine…
The source code of the last Lphant version that was released under the GNU GPL (version 1.01) is available on http://uploaded.to/?id=reprp5 (an alternate place for the same file: http://ur1.ca/2azm ). If talented hackers would like to piss off Discordia by continuing from where the initial developer left off, feel free…
Also, as Matthew Wright told, the real, open source Shareaza still exists at http://www.pantheraproject.net/
I think the safer choice is always to use an open-source client to connect to PSP2 networks.
“if piracy is so bad for their business then WHY THE F### do they have seemingly limitless funds to do half this nonsense.”
Easy, because all of the funds they get from the lawsuits go right back to the anti piracy outfits, not a single dime goes to the artists.
They are making up for lost income by suing customers, and now, entrapping them, and the money from the lawsuits, the money those poor starving artists lost, goes back to the company suing the customers, and isolating them.
It’s a never ending cycle, and will bring on the end of the music and film industry as we know it today, which is good. They are digging their own grave, lets give em a hand
@21
Nice, even have the MS CEO here at TF. Sitting in his ivory tower and I’m sure it’s hard to see the little people from that height.
STEVE when is enough ENOUGH. Start pricing your sh_t fair so everyone can afford it. And the funny thing is you wonder why the absolute monopoly you run gets targeted. Greed Greed Greed.
a moderated forum, pfft, seems my views were too realistic
documentary about copyright
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oar9glUCL0
@23: Quit fscking lying silorts, you Discordia shill.
It is pretty obvious that is what you are.
1 word “UTORRENT”.
How do you see musicians being able to feed, clothe, shelter themselves, and create more music if no one pays them to do it?
@40
It’s great that you think so much of the artists when the fact is they are lucky to get 10% of any revenue, most artists where making music prior to joining a label and most continue after leaving a label, obviously many times wiser although lighter in pocket.
@ 40
Who says nobody pays them? There is a rule that most serious fileshareers follow, if you like it buy it .
Bittorrent is simply what would happen If all the people in the world who had CD’s came into one room and started shareing each others music.
Like 41 said barely 10% goes to musicans, I’d prefer if each of the songs was sold indivudaly and recorded by the artist himself and none of the money was going to tose greedy talentless middlemen
out of interest, have there been any efforts to spoof p2p downloading from prominent celebrities or politicians? One sure fire way to cause some absolute carnage would be to get Oprah Winfrey spoofed downloading hannah montana & lost 4 million times – the media shitstorm would be incredible!
obviously that would be illegal. SO DON’T DO IT KIDS
SHAREAZA WAS NOT KILLED OFF!
it is alive and flourishing at sourceforge.net
@ 40 — “How do you see musicians being able to feed, clothe, shelter themselves, and create more music if no one pays them to do it?”
The same way artists make the majority of their money: touring. Don’t tell me that they get a ton of money from making albums, I’ve worked at a bar in a hotel and talked to several main stream artists, including Metallica and AC/DC. The majority of the money they make is from touring. Record companies make way more off their music than the bands, and the bands rarely see anything from lawsuits.
I fucking steal music all the time. But I buy CD’s from the ones I like. Of course, only at their shows or the sites they tell me to, but I still buy them.
Sorry for getting around you as much as possible, middle man.
Also, if they don’t run out of money soon, most bands are producing and distributing their music themselves, anyways. That means one way or another, the companies are fucked.
Rejoice!
Hey – Let’s go boost some Twinkies from 7-11 – if those pigs try to stop us, we’ll yell about how they’ve been co-opted by “big food.”
Get a life. Pay for what you use.
if ever there is a holding co. that needs to be net bombed to no ends.
Discordia Ltd
ranks high on my list.
This is why you use open-source clients. They’re more reliable and not liable to castration simply because the source code is out there, and people will have copies of the original.
And stealing “for the win” if it means doing what’s right.
Hi, there.
I’m a long-time Lphant user and still continue using Lphant because…
Even if you are lured to download Discordia’s Lphant 4.0 –and it deletes your temp folders– you can always uninstall Lphant 4.0 and re-install Lphant 3.51 and keep doing your P2P business as usual.
Nobody forces you to install Lphant 4 and stop using Lphant 3.51, they can *lure* you, *trick* you, *deceive* you… but not force you.
Lphant 4 uses the Discordian DRM-ed network, whereas Lphant 3.51 keeps using the eDonkey network, Kad and bittorrent, the same server list, the same trackers… Everything is still the same with Lphant 3.51.
The banners in Lphant tell you to download Lphant 4.0, but now you know they come from the Discordites, so you just ignore them.
Lphant.com has been taken over, but Lphant 3.51 survives at lphant.com.es and many other download sites.
If you like Lphant, you can still use Lphant 3.51, no problem, just as you can keep using the real Shareazaa.
If the original Lphant is no longer developed and becomes outdated in the future, there are lots of freeware alternatives waiting for you to discover them.
http://www.lphant.com.es/
http://savelphant.wordpress.com/
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