Shareaza

yes, a legal defense fund was set up and the money was stolen by the late will erwin (may god have mercy on his soul), who had been paid to infiltrate and sabotage shareaza. He lied to and manipulated both us and the FSF and kept the donations for himself. I highly doubt that our users would trust us with there money again, but the money that we received before was not nearly enough to do anything substantial anyways.

Several community members requested and were granted an extension of the opposition period. In the end we decided that the name was not worth recovering anymore and that it was not worth destroying anyone's real-world life over it in a multi-million dollar lawsuit. In the end the trademark was granted because you and every member of the community failed to stand up for it.

Our next move is to do nothing - they can have the trademark. It is as useless to them as it is to us. We could not prove that it had been used in commerce (and it never was) or that anyone had rightful ownership of it, and for that very same reason they cannot file charges against us - nobody has/is/will be making money off of shareaza or even advertising related to it.

In the words of Shakespeare "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." . We would rather keep our current name then to cowardly surrender and try to build a new reputation for ourselves under a new name and face the same, or worse, fate.

Don't get me wrong, we all love shareaza and would love to protect its good reputation. Many of us have put in hundreds, even thousands, of hours worth of development and providing support on the forums and nobody wants to see it die. Some of us have literally been brought to tears over these actions, but when it comes down to it, it's just a bunch of code - It can always be rewritten. Lives cannot be rewritten. Anyone who steps forward to represent us will undoubtedly become the target of the big media corporations behind discordia. We have discussed this thoroughly among ourselves and none of the devs or team are willing to voluntarily put there head on the chopping block, go into millions of dollars in debt, and possibly spend time in jail over this. All this for what? a moral victory? a big screw you to the big media companies?

until this issue is resolved we cannot move forward.

I can surely respect that decision, especially coming from the perspective of someone who isn't in a developer's shoes.

I suppose not standing up against the trademark misappropriation could make it a bit harder for **AA types to find someone legitimate within raza development to sue. *shrug* It'd be nice to know that they can't pull more crap in the future (e.g. (threaten to) sue sourceforge to keep them from distributing any p2p software with the name shareaza) now that they've been given the trademark that covers exactly what raza does. :\

This is so unfair....When i tell my friends they should try donwloading shareaza , whre do u think they go?
Exactly, to shareaza.com, witch at least is down by now. Good think is that sourceforge.net appears as second result of a google search by searching shareaza.
I would say a .com domain would be so much better for the distribuition of shareaza, but i think u guys already know that.

Most people go through the SourceForge site to download Shareaza instead of actually visiting the Shareaza homepage.

Funny thing, the com is the first link, but all the others on the first page lead to real Shareaza.

I find it inspiring that even though this project was attacked multiple times, it still keeps going strong.

Stand up for what you believe in and never let anybody try to push you down.