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.

The record labels argue that the Vuze and the others are knowingly distributing software with the purpose to permit unauthorized access to copyrighted works. In essence they are saying that everything, or every application which allows a user to share files, will be indeed used for illegal purposes. In contrast, in the US, companies that don’t encourage their users to commit copyright infringement with their applications, are not acting illegally.

SPPF had already sued the various companies and organizations last year, but until now it has been unclear whether the US based companies behind the applications could be prosecuted under French law. A French court has now ruled that this is indeed possible, which means that they can proceed to court.

Recent French legislation which inspired the labels to go after the P2P companies, suggests that all P2P applications must have a feature to block the transfer of unauthorized copyright works. The clients that are sued by SPPF obviously don’t have such a feature. In fact, it is questionable whether it would be technically possible to develop such a filter. Nevertheless, SPPF demands it, and is claiming millions of dollars in damages for lost revenue.

Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa stated in a response to TorrentFreak, “While we appreciate the intent of the new French law, we believe SPPF’s complaint is misguided. Vuze is dedicated to the distribution of legitimate content using new technology. In that sense, our interests are aligned with the interests of all content owners, including SPPF’s members, against piracy.”

“We are disappointed that SPPF has taken this approach, given that our business is dedicated to the distribution of legitimate content,” BianRosa added. “SPPF’s claims against Vuze are simply wrong. The Vuze business complies fully with both French and American law. The recent ruling of the French Court was solely on a jurisdictional issue, not on any merits, and we believe it is in error.”

Interestingly, SPPF is also going after Sourceforge, the open source development website, because it hosts the P2P application Shareaza. Putting aside the discussion on the responsibilities of application developers for their users activities, the decision to go after SourceForge for hosting a application that can potentially infringe, is stretching credibility beyond all bounds”

Meanwhile, Vuze has appealed the decision. Separately, the company is suing SPPF for defamation based upon several false and harmful statements made by SPPF about Vuze. A different French Court has denied SPPF’s attempt to derail those claims recently , and is allowing the defamation lawsuit to proceed.

If SPPF succeeds in their case against organizations running the four P2P applications, FTP software and Internet browsers might be next, if they don’t go after Ubuntu and other operating systems first. Perhaps it is even better to shut down the Internet entirely.

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

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/

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.

Now, lawyers for the “fake” or “imposter” Shareaza are threatening the real Shareaza team for a comment made by a user on their forum – things are getting out of hand. So how did this begin?

Last year a company associated with the French RIAA somehow obtained the Shareaza.com domain name from its owner, Mr Jonathan Nilson, who was given the domain in the belief he would keep it safe. Nilson would neither confirm nor deny that he had sold the domain, but speculation suggests that he may have sold it to avoid legal action. Others suggest the domain expired. Either way, the original owners of the domain (the Shareaza creators) don’t have it anymore.

Now the owners of the ‘fake’ Shareaza had control of the domain name previously associated with the real product (shareaza.com), it became easy to pretend to be them. There are two screenshots below – one is the ‘fake’ domain and one is the real thing. Can you spot the imposter?

The real, open source client is represented by the bottom graphic. The ‘fake‘ is at the top and according to Neglacio ;

ShareazaV4, is totally fake. It violates the open-source license, GPL (Version 2) in many ways. Also, it isn’t free nor open source. It requires a subscription and installs a suspicious toolbar. You can read what happened from this reference list: http://tinyurl.com/2cx7ff

Please, update your Shareaza version to Shareaza 2.3.1.0, and change the site from Shareaza.com to the new official site at Sourceforge: http://shareaza.sourceforge.net .

Understandably, the real Shareaza team and users are really upset that this outfit has effectively stolen their brand name from under their noses in a hostile takeover, and is actively ruining their reputation. It’s no surprise that emotions run high when people are ripped off so when a new signup to the real Shareaza forums suggested a small way to get back at the people doing this to them, it wasn’t anything so special. A user called Red Squirrel posted (quote courtesy of Google.com) :

Make it so the real shareaza program queries their site [shareaza.com] every couple of seconds. As an individual user this won’t take much personal bandwidth. But all shareaza users worldwide put together should be enough to kill their server and they won’t really be able to do much since it will be coming from so many different IPs.

Even though a moderator outlined that this behavior might be considered illegal, that wasn’t enough for Meister Seelig & Fein, lawyers representing the company that took over Shareaza.com. Despite now passing themselves off as the real Shareaza, the ‘imposter’ outfit clearly thinks they have the law on their side too. In correspondence sent to the ‘real’ Shareaza team:

This law firm represents Discordia, Ltd., the operator of the website Shareaza.com and owner of the rights in the Shareaza branded software distributed from that domain. Please be advised, that your forum contains a string of posts under the title: “suggestion to kill Shareaza.com.” Under the string, the poster, RedSquirrel offers directions for users of Shareaza software to implement a DoS that would have the effect of destroying or seriously impairing our client’s application and network. The poster OldDeath also offers a manner to illegally attack our client’s business.

Despite whatever complaints your forum’s users may have with our client’s proper and legal business activities, the type of activity promoted on your forum is illegal. Therefore, we request that you immediately remove this string of posts and any future strings of this nature. My client respects your users’ rights to express their points of view. However, the line is crossed when users begin to promote the destruction of a legitimate business (evidently based on out some misguided belief that artists and others who create music should not be fairly compensated for their efforts) via illegal or other predatory means.

If the above cited illegal activity on your site does not immediately cease and desist, our client will take all necessary action to vigorously and relentlessly protect its rights. To be clear, if this action is not immediately taken and, as result, our client’s business is harmed, we will not only pursue, locate and hold fully responsible each and every one of those who have implemented this, or any similar DoS, but also those responsible for maintaining your site and the forums.

Please confirm that the requested action is being taken immediately.

Jeffrey A. Kimmel

Meister Seelig & Fein, LLP
140 E. 45th St., 19th Fl.
New York, NY 10017
(212) 655-3578

Meister Seelig & Fein is the same law firm that struck the distribution deal between iMesh and SonyBMG, so their involvement in this issue is no surprise.

Shareaza.com is offering a pay client that no file sharer wants, for many reasons, including keeping all hashes, downloaded files and chat logs in a database. We certainly don’t recommend it.

Those who prefer the real, free, open-source Shareaza experience should get along to Sourceforge or to this thread where all the genuine domains point.

On the one hand, The Pirate Bay lose a domain they bought legitimately because the IFPI doesn’t like it, but when a music industry outfit attempts the destruction of a completely legal piece of open source software by passing itself off as the real thing, no-one blinks. Sign of the times?

Update: It appears that Shareaza.com has been marked as a web forgery, illustrated in the screenshot below.

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

“As of December 20th, “Shareaza.com” is mirroring “Shareazaweb.com” – A known scam site. While we are working to resolve the matter, any help to contain this would be appreciated.”

The site looks convincing enough, labelled as it is “The Official Home of Shareaza” with the new operators of the site having seen fit to steal some of the original Shareaza artwork (originally created by ‘RocketX and Kid’) to complete the look. So who has taken over the domain?

According to Skinvista, a developer from the ‘real’ Shareaza, the situation is as follows:

“At this time the Shareaza.com destination is now controlled by iMesh/MusicLab LLC, an unauthorized Madison Avenue (New York) based company, with servers in Israel. 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.”

As if this strange case needed any more twists in the plot, consider this. On October 26th 2007, the main Shareaza site went down due to unknown “personal matters”.

TorrentFreak asked ‘Wildcard’ a ‘real’ Shareaza developer what happened to the site. He explained: “That’s one of the mysteries. The main hosting server went offline, it had the Shareaza site, wiki and forums on it. The only information that made it this far, was that it was down due to personal problems with the owner of the server machines. what those personal problems were, medical or legal, we don’t know.”

Luckily the Sourceforge site was restored from an earlier backup.

However, the hijacked Shareaza.com domain now points to a server where it is hosted along with some other questionable sites, including bandoo.com, bearflix.com, bearshare.com, daemonsearch.com, imesh.com, imesh.net and musiclab-llc.com.

Apparently, there are lawyers involved now but the loose-knit Shareaza team are advising that it may be prudent to move forward on the basis that the domain won’t be recovered. A source close to this case has told TorrentFreak that Jonathan Nilson, the owner of the Shareaza.com domain has been contacted and he has confirmed that he has sold the domain to the scammers. It looks like the domain is lost forever, a big impact following the loss of the main site in October.

‘Wildcard’ explained that the software on offer from the hijacked site although labeled “ShareazaV4.exe”, is not Shareaza at all but likely a clone of the new malware infested iMesh/Bearshare client and should not be downloaded under any circumstances. Once installed, the software wants to install a search bar and make contact with a central server. Unlike Shareaza – which is abslutely free and has a reputation for being non-profit and shunning involvement with money – the hijackers are touting a subscription based product.

Indeed, the operators of iMesh even tried to trick people into thinking that the reputable GRC site endorsed the iMesh client – an assertion which is completely untrue.

Anyone wishing to find the real Shareaza client should head over to the project’s SourceForge page.

Developing story

Update: A contact of Jonathan Nilson is reporting that Nilson can neither confirm nor deny that he sold the domain to the scammers.

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

Ever since the initial assault on UK file-sharers, questions have been asked about the functioning of the Logistep ‘File-Sharing Monitor’ snooping software. Many people simply do not wish to allow their file-sharing software to connect to this system, preferring to maintain their privacy. But how can this be achieved?

The secret lies in Logistep’s own description of how their system operates;

The "File Sharing Monitor" program version 1.3 is a modified version of the client of the eDonkey and Gnutella networks of the program "Shareaza" version 2.1.0. All program functions responsible for communication with the servers and the clients are identical with those in the original version.

The Shareaza client Logistep are using doesn’t support a feature built into eMule (ver 0.47b onwards) known as ‘protocol obfuscation’ (PO) or Protocol encryption (PE) in BitTorrent clients like uTorrent and Azureus. From the eMule-Project introduction;

Protocol Obfuscation is a feature which causes eMule to obfuscate or "hide" its protocol when communicating with other clients or servers. Without obfuscation, each eMule communication has a given structure which can be easily recognized and identified as an eMule packet by any observer. If this feature is turned on, the whole eMule communication appears like random data on the first look and an automatic identification is no longer easily possible.

So, as Shareaza does not support PO, anyone who both enables protocol obfuscation and allows only obfuscated connections in eMule’s security options will ensure that they they simply cannot connect to any Shareaza clients, effectively neutralizing the Logistep system. The same effect can be achieved by enabling Protocol encryption in Azureus or uTorrent.

From the eMule-Project;

Clients which do not support obfuscations are ignored, incoming plaintext connections rejected and the automatic server connect will only allow obfuscated connections to a server

The downside to this configuration is that connections cannot be made to non-eMule clients, versions of eMule before 0.47b (which do not support PO) and other clients with PO switched off, which is very likely to reduce download speeds. However, eMule users are unlikely to leave their system configured this way for long and will likely revert to their normal settings once they feel they are no longer at risk of having their privacy breached by Logistep, on behalf of their partners.

It is worth noting that although Logistep appear to have done nothing illegal by modifying and using the Shareaza software, Logistep are not linked with Shareaza in any way and they did not seek permission from Shareaza’s team to use a modified version of the client. ‘deltagamma’, a mod on the Shareaza forums commented “We’re sad that Shareaza code is being misused in such a way.”

This cat and mouse game can and will continue – maybe Logistep changes to another client for collecting their data, maybe they simply start collecting data in another way. What is certain is that this article will not reduce the number of people receiving threatening letters from lawyers demanding money. IP addresses on a spreadsheet are worth big money these days and the law firms know it.

With thanks to qm2003

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

ShareMonkey is a freeware application, and it comes with a plugin that integrates the service with Shareaza. The application is currently Windows only and adds a “where is this file from” to the right click context menu. If you lookup a file ShareMonkey searches their online database and matches the pirated file to a DVD or CD that you can buy online.

The philosophy behind the application is that most pirates want to “try before they buy”. But I doubt if this application will be very useful, since ShareMonkey only redirects to products Amazon, which is not very revolutionary. Pirates do not just want to try before they buy, they want their DVD, game or music album on demand, wherever they want, whenever they want. It would be good if they go beyond Amazon and add support for online music and video services where people can download legal digital copies instantly.

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

(Correct at 13:00GMT)

eMule Plus just missed the Top10, sitting where it does at number 11 with 21,018,700 downloads and is backed up by FTP project FileZilla at number 13 with 19,944,891 gets.

The seasoned file-sharer is only too aware of how important the Open Source software movement is to their cause and SourceForge’s stats appear to reinforce that. I wonder how long it will take the fresh-faced BitTorrent client Halite to break the Top 10? It’s currently ranked 8,117 with 8,848 downloads. 2008? 2009? Why not give it a try!

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