Bearshare Shut Down by RIAA

Pichu0102 writes "According to WebProNews, Bearshare has been shut down by the RIAA." From the article: " Online file-sharing service BearShare, along with operators Free Peers Inc., is packing it up due to a $30 million settlement with the recording industry. The conditions of the settlement were agreed to by the P2P company to avoid further copyright infringement litigation."

Re:Why spare the big fish?

[larry bagina]

Some of the index servers have been seized [slashdot.org] recently.

Re:lol

[leuk_he]

Well appearantly a lot of people still use it. How else could they have 4.2 million dollars earned with installing spyware?

Don't know is this a reason to laugh.

But gnutella network? not even g2? cry....

Re:RIAA = New entourage of robber barons

[Anonymous Coward]

The loss of Eldred_v._Ashcroft [wikipedia.org] was bad enough. Essentially Congress now has unlimited power.

Having Supreme Court Justicies like Ruth Bader Ginsburg [wikipedia.org] doesn't help. She and her mother are outspoken attorneys in favor of unlimited IP rights and unlimited congressional powers. Remember kids, if you extend a law for 50 years every 10 years, ad infinitum, that's not "unlimited"!

Now we're seeing things like the JRMI Model Train SDK [sourceforge.net] project getting sued [lwn.net] (1/2 pg. down) for $300,000.00 for infringing patents. The impact of this kind of suit on small software developers, whether free or closed, will be devastating.

And the DMCA [lwn.net] getting new provisions that treat IP violations like drug crimes...forfiture of property! That's right, if little Bobby downloads a song from the internet, the RIAA can seize your house, car, property, etc.

Yay America! The land of freedom and liberty!

Re:Why spare the big fish?

[TubeSteak]

From TFA:

BearShare was among several P2P service to receive cease-and-desist letters from the RIAA in September of last year. Others include Warez P2P, Limewire, eDonkey, and Soulseek, all of whom have not yet reached a settlement.

Anyways, shutting down these businesses won't actually kill their networks. I can't think of any networks that are centralized like Napster used to be.

A more detailed account of this tail.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=22181 [slyck.com]
I have not used Bearshare for years.
it's just another gnutella clients.
Only with spyware the edonkey/emule network is better anyway and its open source.

Re:Why spare the big fish?

[TubeSteak]

When you're logged in, go here: http://yro.slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edithome [slashdot.org]

The very first drop down box is: Date/Time Format

You can change that & /. will show whatever variation on day, date, month, year, and/or time that you could want.

and if you do a quick search, you'll find references to 2006 in the thread.

ummm if they've ceased??? why is their website up?

[atarione]

http://www.bearshare.com/ [bearshare.com]

d/l of bs clinet still active too.. as of 12:37PM PST

Re:New Business Plan...

[Zocalo]

Actually, there are a couple of not insignificant flaws with your steps numbered #3 and #4:

3. Pay $30M to prevent further copyright infringement lawsuits.
4. Loss.

Although step 4 could be profit if can you manage to clear more than your settlement in subscription fees, ad revenue and then selling on the personal details of your subscribers once all other operating expenses are taken into account. That probably didn't happen here though, and is unlikely to happen to the next "business" to try using this kind of business model and subsequently attracts the legal wrath of the media industry either.

Re:RIAA = New entourage of robber barons

[mindtriggerz]

That's a little bit inacurate. TR really didn't do as much trust-busting as most people think. He favored regulation of monopolies, and used the threat of breaking them up to get them to swollow regulation.
OTOH, Taft did more trustbusting, but was fat and innefective otherwise.

Re:A valuable lesson

[novus ordo]

I don't know how that is insightful. Gnutella is anything but a centralized network. Are you suggesting running a decentralized corporation to rake in the profits?

Re:Why spare the big fish?

[alanthenerd]

Mine says "Posted by ScuttleMonkey on 17:11 Wednesday 22 February 2006".
Check your preferences, there are many different date display formats available.

Re:Why spare the big fish?

[AnyoneEB]

Or if you want to be really paranoid and still use eMule, just do not connect to any servers. Kad searches usually get a lot more results than global server searches anyway.

Re:Good ridance to the malware!

[Motherfucking Shit]

BearShare comes with a bundled copy of SaveNow. The installer explicitly mentions this. Removing it is as simple as killing the process and running the SaveNow uninstaller from Add/Remove Programs, and doing so has no impact on BearShare's usability. I'm no fan of these bundled apps, but this is far from spyware and even malware is a stretch. BearShare is extremely up-front about exactly what is going to be installed, that's a lot more than you can say for many of these apps.

BTW, I haven't RTFA but BearShare is still alive and kicking [bearshare.com] and you can even still download the installer [bearshare.com]. As long as people still have the client, the RIAA hasn't "shut down" anything.

Bearshare's still runing.

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry if this is a repeat, but Bearshare is still up & running. i just downloaded a file.