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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Dear friends and supporters,

The Shareaza Development Team would like to extend our thanks to all of you for your contributions towards our Legal Defense Fund. 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.

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 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.

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. 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 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!

Inquiries can be made via our forums here

Kind regards,

Shareaza Community

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Last week, the corporate battle against this almost defenseless collective of people working on the Shareaza project took a somewhat miserable twist when the operators of the fake Shareaza site (Discordia Ltd) threatened legal action against the real Shareaza, all because of a comment made by a user on their forums.

If you’re starting to get a little annoyed that this company is pushing its luck, you may be interested to know that their lawyers – Meister Seelig & Fein in New York – have links to the new owners of iMesh and Bearshare, both initially free, both now converted to pay services after legal action.

So if it doesn’t unsettle you that some music-industry backed company has come in and stamped all over a GNU GPL project, took their domain name, passed their own software off as the real thing and threatened legal action, then maybe this will:

On January 10th 2008, lawyers representing ‘Discordia Ltd’ filed for registration of the ‘Shareaza’ trademark at the United States Patent Office. As yet, the trademark has not been granted to them but according to staff at the real Shareaza project, it must be urgently contested. Discordia claim that the first commercial use of the Shareaza trademark was December 17 2007 but other documentation suggests Discordia claim copyright since 1999. The real Shareaza project has been running since 2004.

If Discordia are successful in their application, it will put the original real Shareaza in a position where they infringe on the imposter’s trademark and will doubtless be subjected to legal action.

According to a source at the real Shareaza: “Discordia Ltd. under which the trademark was sought is a Cyprus shell company designed to shield MusicLab, iMesh, parent companies and business partners from the exceedingly high risk of liability in this case. Private information will not be disclosed, however there is significant circumstantial evidence regarding the source of their unethical and illegal behaviors that ought to be brought to light for the greater internet community.”

The real Shareaza guys are calling out for support, you can read exactly what they need here, but they are also calling on all of the budding internet investigators out there to research Discordia, iMesh, MusicLab and lawfirm Meister Seelig & Fein to dig up any information that could be of use to them in fighting these imposters.

To defend against the trademark application, the Shareaza team really need support as the financial burden is quite high, they explain:

No Shareaza developer or enthusiast has ever recieved money as a result. However, several volunteers now out-of-pocket for hundreds of dollars are facing the prospect of thousands. Shareaza has always been and will always remain free, non-commercialized software – regardless of the high value of its use that must be protected. Donations will now begin to be accepted for the sole purpose of partially compensating these unfortunate expenses. (Including a possible $900 at very short notice.) A ChipIn account has been established for PayPal (account/credit card) payments large or small. Please consider sending at least the loose change in your account to show your appreciation for enthusiasts who could scarcely afford these costs themselves. Feel free to offer in other ways as well.

Personally I think this is a very worthy and symoblic cause. No-one likes being bullied, particularly by the music industry so when they choose to pick on people with few resources, the only way they can be beaten is if people stick together and act together. Shareaza isn’t my favorite client – even with its support for BitTorrent – but it’s free in every possible way with its GNU GPL license and these people from Discordia are determined to tear it all apart. It’s unthinkable that they can be allowed to get away with it.

Discordia should consider this statement about the legal standing of trademarks:

“Immoral, deceptive or scandalous matter or matter which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols or bring them into contempt or disrepute is not trademarkable.”

The real Shareaza team sends the final message:

You Can Help Most of All by Spreading the Word – SHAREAZAâ„¢ is the property of the Shareaza development team.

You can donate to the cause by clicking here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.