The hijacking of Shareaza.com is a complex story with many twists and turns. Here is the story of Shareaza from its open source GPL roots, to the hostile takeover and where the project is today, directly from those at the heart of the news - the real Shareaza community. The fight for Shareaza has only just begun.

Beginnings Are a Good Place To Start

In mid 2002, a lone programmer by the name of Micheal Stokes released the first version of a Gnutella client he had written, dubbed “Shareaza”. Over the next two years Micheal added to his client and coded in support for the eDonkey 2000 network, BitTorrent and a rewritten Gnutella-based protocol which he named Gnutella2. Shareaza gradually became more and more popular and Mike started to receive several job offers based on the strength of his work on Shareaza. He eventually decided that continuing to work on a p2p application in an increasingly hostile legal climate was too risky, but he did the honorable thing and released the Shareaza source code under the GNU GPLv2 on June 1, 2004 (which coincided with the release of Shareaza V 2.0).

Mike stopped working on Shareaza and went on to develop a new p2p-based streaming radio project named Mercora. As part of distancing himself from Shareaza, he transfered the shareaza.com domain to one of his old alpha testers named Jon Nilson, who continued to administer the domain until late 2007.

The French (RIAA) Connection

In late 2007 the Shareaza website went down for several weeks, but eventually came back online. Not long after that, the Shareaza.com domain began pointing to a different website which several sharp-eyed community members recognized as identical to shareazaweb.com, a known scam site purporting to offer users “legal p2p downloads”. It emerged that Jon Nilson had been forced to relinquish control of the domain as part of a settlement with La Societe Des Producteurs De Phonogrammes En France (the French version of the RIAA). Jon’s name was the only one connected with Shareaza that the SPPF could find and due to Shareaza’s popularity in France he had been named in a lawsuit along with Azureus and Morpheus. See here for more. Read the rest of this entry »

After taking control of Shareaza.com, imposters trying to pass themselves off as an open-source dev team have stepped up their action to destroy the GNU GPL licensed project. In an audacious move, lawyers representing Discordia Ltd have filed to register the “Shareaza” trademark at the US Patent Office.

In a December 2007 hostile takeover, a company took control of Shareaza.com, the domain name used previously for the real, open-source Shareaza P2P client. The real Shareaza client is 6th in the Sourceforge all-time Top 10 downloads and is completely free (GNU General Public License), but this company is passing off its own closed-source software as the real thing. Essentially, they are stealing the Shareaza brand name and goodwill from right under the operators noses in an effort to crush the project.

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. Read the rest of this entry »