Shareaza Team Fights Back With Project Panthera
Written by enigmax on August 18, 2008The team behind the Shareaza client have recently had a tough time, having been the victim of a music industry conspiracy to steal their brand name and destroy goodwill. Undeterred they are fighting back and today proudly announce the development of a brand new filesharing client with BitTorrent support – Project Panthera.
Since its release, the open source Shareaza has been downloaded an impressive 43,000,000 times from Sourceforge alone, making it one of the most successful filesharing clients. However, through no fault of the development team, its recent history is complicated and at times sinister.
After turning two other filesharing applications, Bearshare and iMesh, into pay services, a company called Discordia Ltd turned their attention to Shareaza. The company, which seems to be related to the recording industry hijacked the Shareaza domain and moved to seize the valuable Shareaza trademark as their own. Discordia even had the nerve to set their lawyers on the open source team. A summary of the entire scandalous story so far can be obtained here.
Back in May the Shareaza team announced “We’re fighting back!” and today we bring good news in the battle to neutralize the nefarious intentions of Discordia – the release of a brand new client. We interview Wout and Alex of Shareaza about their new baby: Project Panthera.
TF: The Shareaza client has enjoyed considerable success over the years. What inspired you to taper off the effort on the old software and embark on this huge effort of creating a whole new client?
Wout: Due to recent events beyond our scope of expertise, we were required to rethink our strategy surrounding Shareaza. Because we can count on the support of a massive userbase, we decided to create a new client, with some of the features requested most for Shareaza, but which we were never able to introduce.
TF: Shareaza is a very well known name in the P2P community – it’s been downloaded way in excess of 43 million times. What were the factors that led to the decision to create a fresh brand? (Project Panthera)
Wout: Well once again some people demonstrated how low a person is able to go. We learned that a company owned by Imesh (Discordia) filed for a trademark on the Shareaza brand name. Even though they have no ties to the program or the Shareaza brand. So in essence they are just doing it to benefit from the Shareaza name. This was also a factor in naming the application. We didn’t want them to benefit from our developers hard work yet again.
Alex: We basically got mugged by a gang armed with lawyers. This meant we had to reconsider our whole approach to managing Shareaza’s development to ensure the long term survival of the project. We can see a real danger that this may happen to other popular free software projects too.
Something interesting we’ve discovered: did you know that the United States Patent and Trademark Office aren’t connected to the Internet? When Discordia Ltd. filed for the trademark on our name, we wrote to the USPTO and pointed out that we’ve been using the Shareaza name for years. They said they can’t investigate sources external to their own database. We said “Couldn’t you just spend 30 seconds Googling the name of the application?” They said their procedures don’t allow them to do that. This rubbish is actually the basis of intellectual property law in the U.S. and many other western nations. Is it any wonder people are going out and creating their own licenses like the GPL and the various flavors of Creative Commons out of sheer bloody frustration with the IP laws?
According to Alex, “F**king heaps!” of time and effort have gone into the development of Panthera, “a massive job” which has been underway since April 2008, and in part personally financed by members of the team. As Panthera is (of course) an open source project and does not include any adware or bundled software, Wout told us that the team are counting on donations to help them make this software the best of its kind.
TF: What are the key features of ‘Panthera’ and why is this release superior to the ‘old’ software? Why should people switch?
Wout: Panthera has every feature Shareaza has and much more. Panthera includes decent BitTorrent support (libtorrent), skin support, proper Gnutella1 support, no use of the registry and a completely revamped media player. There is no denying it – we looked at Shareaza a lot when coding this app, and whenever we found some code that was interesting, we asked ourselves: “How can we make it better?”
TF: Panthera is a multi-network client, including BitTorrent. Tell us a bit more about the implementation and the support for other networks.
Wout: Panthera supports Gnutella1, Gnutella2, BitTorrent and ED2K (not in beta but it will be in final release). The BitTorrent in the beta release will be the default QT (more about this later) BitTorrent sample client. This is for testing purposes only. Once we have enough test data, we will replace this with Libtorrent from Rasterbar.
Alex: Shareaza has a long history with BitTorrent – we were the first client to experiment with decentralized torrents for example – but since the BitTorrent scene has just exploded, our home grown implementation has fallen behind the times which is why we’ve decided to implement the libtorrent library. One other reason is that as we’re free and open source, we figured it was about time we started taking advantage of our right to use other people’s free and open source code where its better than ours. Why reinvent the wheel when there is a perfectly good solution just sitting there waiting for people to use it under the same copyleft conditions we believe in?
TF: Panthera is multi-network, and multi-platform too. Tell us more about this.
Wout: Multi platform means more users, means more files, means more and faster downloads. No other P2P program allows to connect to virtually all the most popular networks on every operating system.
Alex: Linux especially is starting to become a viable alternative to Windows and many of our developers and supporters are either dual booting or have switched to Linux environments completely. The next logical step is native multi-platform support. As Wout says, broader coverage = win.
Clearly a project of such ambition can consume considerable resources. Wout and Alex agree that they will take all the help they can get, noting that they “absolutely need testers and feedback” and welcome anyone who is prepared to code, test or donate. In particular they would be very grateful for offers of help from developers – the program is based on the QT framework and is coded entirely in C++, and anyone with experience of Rasterbar’s Libtorrent.
It is possible that Discordia might just be successful in stealing the Shareaza brand name but the team remains upbeat and is full of enthusiasm for Panthera.
“It’s given us a chance to re-write a fantastic P2P app and make it even better,” says Alex, “which is a perfect example of the file-sharing Hydra in action.”
Panthera Project will be officially available on August 25th but in the meantime, temporary test builds are available here.
Anyone offering project support should contact the team on contribute@pantheraproject.com.
Those able to donate, should do so via donations@pantheraproject.com
Don’t forget, the real Shareaza project is located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/shareaza/
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52 Responses
Good luck with your new project guy’s. It’s a shame the US is in such a state of turmoil concerning IP and copyright laws, among other things. If you look at who and what is really running our country though, it isn’t too surprising. We can only hope Americans will one day wake up and realize that our once great nation has been hijacked by criminals. The only way to fix it is revolution. Not rioting and looting but marching on the white house and arresting these crooks. Until then it’s a fixed game unless you have power and influence. The whole system is rigged.
Good show guys, dont let the bastards win without a fight.
They may have the money and the lawyers but in the end they can never match brains with you guys and deep down they will always be slimy.
It may be an uphill battle but those are the ones that really taste good in victory,Good luck and godspeed!
Cheers!
http://www.ezee.se
Why use so many worlds to by step the fact that shareaza got pwned? +Nobody uses them anyway
@2:
i used to use shareaza a few years ago and it was a fairly decent client. and i’m sure it’s gotten way better since then, thank you very much.
and this pretty much shows a PRIME example of how american companies are in bed with eachother.
@ waffles54
So the 43 million downloads means nothing? It clearly has a following and the thing about it is that it has always been rather n00b friendly and so those new to p2p where able to get into it easily
I use Shareaza occasionally.
Good client and indeed n00bfriendly to those new to p2p. It gives a good overview of the main p2p networks and protocols.
Looking forward to Panthera!
Gogo shareaza team, love the new rebranding!
I can’t imagine how terrible it would be to work so hard and have someone else try to get the name like this… It must be so frustrating! Good luck on the new project, though. Lawyers can be terrible people :(
Given the history why wasn’t question #1 “Did you register the trademark yet”
I used Shareaza back in the day, I understand how crappy the copyright shit is in the US it needs to be re-worked totally but who knows when that will happen.
I look forward to this new project, I have been looking for a good multi-network client when I want to grab some files that I don’t feel like using bittorrent for, keep up the good work guys!
Fuck Discordia and anyone who supports them.
You are by fact, no better then the people you call ‘thieves’. By your actions, you have said very clearly that Pirating is 100% OK by your company’s standards.
Welcome to the Pirate Ocean Discordia.
@9
When will it happen? As soon as people start protesting it in masses.
Wow, this is like a full circle for me as Shareaza was the first application I really started using for file sharing.
It’s a great peice but it dwindled some time ago, lacking the basic needs of torrenters with only the other P2P networks being filled with spam.
It’s a graphic masterpeice for an open source app tho, great detail + simplicity.
uTorrent is better if you “know torrents”. If youre new to P2P and dont have access to or dont know about good trackers or clients this might be good since it got so many networks in one client.
@7
That was my first thought too. Amazing that such an obvious question was overlooked. :(
I just wonder if the new client is gonna be as bloated as the old one. Well.. Perhaps it is just the java base making it feel laggy and bloated. Since there was no effort to promote it being a lighter weight client, I can only assume it’ll be just as bloated as most clients of this type (limewire included).
That said, I’ll probably still use the thing for the little files that sometimes aren’t easy to snag as torrents (and of course utorrent for torrents unless my bloat speculation is disproven).
Shareaza nor Panthera have a java base… where did you get that info?
Neither Shareaza nor Panthera are bloated. They provide access to every network out there that has a reputation and they do it without fuss….
By getting the trademark though it’s kind of letting the current system stay though. Some people say that the only way to change the system is to succeed in it first, but frankly I don’t see the logic in that, because then you become ammo against yourself (if you can succeed so can everyone else = okay system). Having a GPL itself should cover that, not to mention whatever you trademark should be related to you in some way (clearly not for big business though, that’s ludicrous).
I will try the final release when it’s out.
The big problem with Shareaza was that it had become very outdated.
Bittorrent capability as well as Edonkey capability has lagged several years behind current standards, such as decentralization and encryption.
Lack of current standards support meant that Shareaza users were completely locked out of eMule’s KAD network as well as most private torrent sites, even though Shareaza marketed itself as Bittorrent and ED2K compliant.
As a multi-network client, Shareaza had become such a poor performer on ANY network (except for its own G2 network) that no intelligent P2P enthusiast would even consider using Shareaza.
In order to combat the system, you must be outside the system, not enmeshed in it. Although trademark is by far a much smaller problem the copyright, it still have become a problem because of its expansion recently. It should go back to doing it’s original purpose: to prevent impersonation.
Panthera is already a registered trademark, Google says “1,810,000 for panthera. (0.05 seconds)” and it would cost Discordia a bunch of peanuts to register a new trademark.
How stupid are these guys?
Along with eD2K support, will it also include Kad support? eD2K servers have been dropping left and right and I’ve found that I have to use Kad to get any search results now.
On an unrelated note, would someone please track down the WordPress authors and beat them with a club until they finally fix this damn “You’re posting comments too quickly” bug???
Of course, even if trademark has gotten too expansive, it’s not like one is unable to fight it even if one has a trademark. It’s basic principle is to prevent other people from trademarking it. Duh.
Or is that image shockingly similar to a image at my school of our mascot? I swear it looks similar.
Well, I was just assuming they were java based (cause they seem to share sluggishness with clients like LimeWire).. My bad..
So I actually went and d/l the client.. Love the fact that it is ‘portable’ and hope it stays that way, first off..
It really doesn’t seem bloated at all, compared to the laggy operation of Shareaza. Pretty quick response in this sucker. Too bad it is still soooo Alpha.. Crashes a lot, unusably so. Hopefully the Aug. 25th release will make it more feasible.
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=831045
Well, the one thing I don’t understand is whether or not Shareaza is becoming Panthera. I really hope that Discordia’s fakeaza won’t get the trademark, and in all cases the battle is not over. So I’m a bit confused: are Shareaza folks are giving up the legal fight and focus on programming? Is this just in case they would lose the name? A little clarification would be nice.
As for Shareaza being bloated, come on dudes, right now it’s running on 128 Mbytes on an old Pentium III with 0.5 Ghz along with Ooo and Firefox at the same time under Winblows Millennium. In all cases, even if you don’t like the app, this is a threat for all free, open source file sharing applications, not only Shareaza.
@7 – I’m a little surprised as well that no one thought to register “Shareaza”….
“Panthera” appears to have been filed for as a U.S. trademark pertaining to “Computer software for communications and downloads between peer to peer networks” by “Phoenix Holdings International LLC LTD LIAB CO ST.CHRIST-NEVIS The Edith L Solomon Bldg., Main Street P.O. BOX 636 Charlestown ST.CHRIST-NEVIS” on May 22, 2008 – anybody know who this is?
On this occasion there was no conspiracy. Nilson wanted out and simply sold the domain to iMesh when they made a cash offer he couldn’t refuse. Blaming an industry-wide conspiracy should be reserved for when there actually is one (like the boy who cried wolf).
The moral of this story is not to entrust valuable domains to 3rd parties.
#28: As far as I can tell you, Phoenix holdings is the name that stands above THIS new Shareaza, Panthera. This is to ensure that the US copyright system will allow Panthera to be trademarked, since Phoenix (that has risen out of the ashes of Shareaza) is registered as a real “company”. Just like Azureus has, and LimeWire, and others…
#29 Nilson didn’t do it for money. As far as I know, he was threatened with a lawsuit just because his name was on the whois record, and to avoid it he preferred to give up the domain. Read Shareaza forums at http://shareaza.sourceforge.net/ , there are detailed information about this.
Well, here’s the exact URL: http://www.shareazasecurity.be/forum/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=1070
I particularly like the following part, and it’s not about Nilson this time: “Of note, one volunteer effectively withdrew from the project last year after a ranking iMesh contact offered him large sums of money to disrupt Shareaza”. The guy refused the money, as explained in a reply.
Hope they wont do the same with this project. Good luck!
Shareeza ROCKS, especially since Morpheus quit working. Lime Wire is a close second I think.
JF
http://www.datools.net.tc
so no steps towards anonymity?
I’d have thought this would have been top of the priority list, not having a revamped media player… ho hum!
If it looks like you’re going to lose your rightful trademark to an illegitimate party, change the name and make sure every Shareaza user knows about it. By doing so one hopes that the majority of it’s user base will move to Panthera, thus resulting in the Shareaza name becoming completely worthless. This is an intelligent move, and is smarter than trying to fight what would likely become a costly legal battle. Plan for the worst and hope for the best I always say.
In the beginning I used Napster. After that came Kazaa, followed closely by Shareaza and finally Bittorrent, the only P2P protocol I use at the moment. Shareaza was a good program during it’s reign. I never had any issues with it, at least until something better came along. Hopefully Panthera will become a worthy successor.
“he hired some Indian programmers (about $20/hour).”
BWAHAHAHA. How long until you exploit little children from third world countries to do you work?
Pixelated is a moron. (guy from the 1st post).
to ryo-oh-ki:
So I’m confused.
If Project Panthera is the REPLACEMENT for open-source Shareaza, why are you still developing for the 2.3.x line?
If if you’re continuing development of the 2.3.x line, why haven’t you switched project names yet?
You’ve lost the name Shareaza. It’s over. Time to move on. This happens all the time (Ethereal to Wireshark) and it just seems petulant to stick with the name “Shareaza”, when you KNOW it’s causing confusion.
The Limewire people immediately changed their project name to Frostwire, and that didn’t seem to create lots of problems.
I for one, would like to see a book written about this theft of Shareaza debacle. A whole book. It’s just so bizarre, the back story. I was in utter amazement at the weirdness of how (and why) this all happened. Good on the Panthera team for starting over.
Shareaza sucks, has sucked and will continue to suck. You can name it panthera or pussycat if you wish, it won’t change.
I think zab is available for coding on Shareaza or Panthera, too. That is for 1000$/h… but he’s worth it!
To clarify a little: Existing Shareaza 2.X codebase -and the Shareaza name- will continue to be developed in some form for many years to come, regardless of the US legal outcome.
‘Panthera’ is an entirely new software inspired by the Shareaza wishlist, and is only one of several new projects being created by the Shareaza Community, not necessarily the Devs.
Suffice to say while contingencies are in place and nothing is going down without a fight, there is a wealth of proliferation happening quietly- Panthera is just the first to announce itself.
Discordia Ltd = Brown note.
Ramone! Enema bag these douches!
@31 thanks for setting the record straighter on this. I’d still maintain that the kid was scared sh1tless and sold out. Whether or not this was to avoid a lawsuit is a moot point IMHO (though the well-substantiated claim that Nilson was only named by the MAFIAA on the basis of whois data lends credence to the idea that it was indeed a sellout. It’s not that difficult to cry blackmail after the event). The moral re domain control remains.
iMesh are owned by a highly-secretive Israeli company. However they do have a NY, NY forwarding address that any good whois junkie could find if they wanted (I shall refrain from posting it in case TF censor me again, like with oinky’s holiday snaps, in which he looked FAT).
Fun times.
forget the “aside” the correct word is “together”. :)
Well @ #41 & #42
Maybe zab (LimeWire Developer) needs a new job as he will surely be unemloyed when LW goes down the drain after the court case.
#41 Okay, the initial developer of Shareaza had a somewhat cavalier approach when he released the Gnutella 2: he didn’t refer to the community, built everything on his own (taking from the community but not giving back), at that time Shareaza was a proprietary freeware (whereas the specs of Gnutella are public), and the name made some users believe that Gnutella 2 was the improved successor of Gnutella whereas it’s not.
More information on http://www.slyck.com/story100_Gnutella_vs_Gnutella2_Part_1
(just keep in mind that BearShare is not a Gnutella client since its takeover by iMesh/Discordia guys).
That said, years later isn’t it finally time to turn the page? He released the source code and left the project (unfortunately). Shareaza is now maintained by volunteers, and personally I’m pretty grateful to all these LimeWire ultrapeers I’m connected to, so I certainly don’t want LimeWire to go out of business :) If we don’t turn the page, it means /they/ win…
well i have used both p2p and torrents yes p2p is great but the problem is tooooooo meny viruses and i think from personal perspective that torrents are the future and you complain that this is thiving well yes but without this you wold have to buy things so shut up and d/l lol keep going Shareaza you will win simply because your users the loyal ones anyway lol go Shareaza
I don’t think you can get those single much-sought-after classic rare files you want in torrents.
#38
Because the developers currently working on Shareaza are NOT working on Panthera? Does that answer your question?
Day went by, no release, no word, nothing.
And Still Nothing….WTF???
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