At TorrentFreak we have a policy of doing proper fact checking on everything we write, but occasionally we make a mistake. When this happens, we’re more than happy to make a correction, and today is one of those days.

Regular TorrentFreak readers may remember the article on Moses Avalon, the well-respected music industry expert who predicted that TorrentFreak would have to shut down because of new legislation being mulled by the US Government.

Although the proposed legislation is related to the streaming of copyrighted material, Avalon somehow believes that news sites like Wired, Slashdot and TorrentFreak would also be rendered illegal.

At the time we wrote a rebuttal, claiming that Avalon’s musings were absurd, but the man himself disagreed. Moses, who claims to have worked with Bob Dylan, Madonna and Britney Spears, whose blog has 100,000 readers, and who makes regular TV appearances, stood behind his prediction.

Aside from news sites, one of the ‘illegal’ services listed by Avalon was Grooveshark, the music streaming service that has a licensing deal with EMI among others. We assumed that this, and the fact that it has operated as a US company for years without being sued into oblivion, would not make it a prime target.

This week, however, Google booted the Grooveshark app from the Android market over licensing concerns, following in the steps of Apple who made the same decision a few months ago. Avalon went bananas upon hearing the news and told his readership how wrong we were with his rant titled “TorrentFreak Face the Music: Grooveshark is Doomed.”

Although the Grooveshark issue has nothing to do with the legislation Avalon referred to in the first instance, we are of course more than happy to admit that Grooveshark is indeed not “fully licensed” as we initially wrote. In fact, from now on we will become true followers of Moses’ gospel, even though that necessarily means the end of our existence.

Like Mr. Avalon we now believe that everything that remotely relates to P2P, licensed or not, is doomed. This means that apart from TorrentFreak, Wired and Slashdot, the music subscription services iMesh and Bearshare will also, as predicted by Avalon, be shutdown in the near future.

To some the inclusion of iMesh and Bearshare on Avalon’s list might seem odd because the two services are promoted by the RIAA, but considering their P2P stigma that appears to be irrelevant.

We did of course ask Avalon why the RIAA would be promoting such illegal services, and thankfully he was willing to comment. “The RIAA can list whomever they want, as ‘approved’ but believe it or not they do not actually speak collectively for all the labels,” he told us.

“If you believe the RIAA to be underhanded and unreasonable, then there is no which thing as ‘RIAA Approved’. If you believe they’re honorable and good for their word, then you are exposing a rather large gap in your site’s position and philosophy,” Avalon’s musings continued.

So there we have it. A leading music industry expert is claiming that the RIAA is for some odd reason promoting illegal music services, against the wishes of the major labels. Now that’s something we have to believe in, don’t we?

We would like to thank Avalon for opening our eyes; TorrentFreak will never be the same again and hopefully that will permit us to stay online. In addition, we would also like to retract our earlier statement where we said that Mr. Avalon was a classic narcissist. That is, if he can please stop asking us to interview him for a feature article on TorrentFreak – the answer is ‘no’.

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

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.

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.

The Borg are known, “both within and beyond Star Trek fandom for their relentless pursuit of what they want to assimilate,” says Wikipedia., and increasingly, Assimilate or Die seems to be the choice facing the commercial p2p application operators, with Bearshare as the latest company to go over.

Casualties in the p2p wars so far include it, Grokster, iMesh and LimeWire, with Morpheus, Blubster and Warez as the hold-outs. Sharman Networks’ Kazaa, which recently announced a $115 settlement deal, is a case by itself.

Kazaa became the p2p application, walking in the open door when Big Music crushed the original Napster. But it almost single-handedly introduced spyware to the Net to become a pariah within the informed p2p world, also being relentlessly pursued through the Ausralian courts by the Big Four labels who accused it of being a facillitator of ‘illegal’ file sharing.

Alone, it was a lost cause and Sharman associates Altnet, a peddler of a DRM application described by Freenet creator Ian Clarke as a lame duck, and Brilliant Digital Entertainment were in equally dire straits. But Sharman and its friends both achieved their ambitions and saved the day by ‘settling’ with the cartels, reaching an accord they’d been seeking for years and indeed, Altnet is already being touted on a Big Four site, re-introducing its so-called Global File Registry.

And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a shiny new (and ‘legal’) Kazaa will appear soon, ‘legal’ in this context meaning compliant with the desires of Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the Big Four record label monopolies, with the major Hollywood studios close behind.

Meanwhile iMesh was in effect the first former independent p2p company to ‘settle’ with the Big Four Organized Music cartel, reopening as an “approved” p2p “network” soon afterwards.

In July 2004, the Big Four agreed to let iMesh continue operating, “even with millions of copyrighted songs being traded online – while the new service was being developed,” said CNET at the time. “In return, iMesh agreed to pay labels $4.1 million” and, there was, “genuine excitement about the offering,” the story had the Big Four’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) boss Mitch Bainwol saying.

Now, “iMesh, Inc. subsidiary MusicLab LLC today announced the beta launch of the newly acquired BearShare software in an authorized peer-to-peer application (P2P) – BearShare 6.0,” says an iMesh press release, going on:

“Continuing its commitment to the authorized P2P marketplace, iMesh offers consumers a compelling service inclusive of the traditional benefits common to the P2P file-sharing experience, while assuring compensation to registered rightsholders through the new BearShare application.

“With the acquisition of BearShare assets in May 2006, including its expansive user base, iMesh further solidifies its position as the largest globally active authorized P2P service.”

iMesh is run by ex-Sony Music boss Robert Summer.

One wonders what’ll happen to the Bearshare database with its priceless and confidential personal information on millions of former users? Similarly, wonders what’s to happen with the Kazaa user data base?

Kazaa was by far the most-named application in the vicious sue ‘em all marketing war run by the Big Four’s RIAA in the US and other so-called ‘trade’ organizations elsewhere in the world.

Meanwhile, BearShare 6.0 will include the introduction of a ToGo portable music renal service under which users pay to borrow downloads which disappear as soon as they stop paying.

“The service offers consumers both a subscription plan and a la carte options for premium content, with the ability to download and burn music and videos,” says the statement.

It’s free for 30 days, “and will transition to a subscription plan thereafter,” it adds.

Back to The Borg, they’ve, “become a powerful symbol in popular culture for any seemingly unstoppable force against which ‘resistance is futile’,” says Wikipedia.

Is that the case in the peer-to-peer world? Certainly, with The Borg controlling the mainstream lamescream media it seems to be.

But in Star Trek The Borg always eventually come unstuck, thanks to their untrammelled greed, and in the real online world, for the first time in history ordinary people are completely by-passing the traditional corporate press, using blogs and web sites to disseminate unspun, unfettered and accurate news and information to each other.

And with this parallel universes are building with corporations which thrive on consumer control, lies and deception in one, and communities which foster openness, truth and innovation, in the other.

Stay tuned.

p2pnet

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