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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."
when does it end?
who actually uses bear share anyway?
...today a new startup called ShareBear P2P was just formed....film at 11.
I just heard some sad news on slashdot - P2P/Warez appBearshare was found dead in their New York colo this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss them- even if you didn't enjoy downloading britney spears songs or installing bonzai buddy, there's no denying their contributions to FREE music. Truly a DMCA icon.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The Emule network is bigger. Why spare it? I have just checked it out and find that the available files now are 677.5 million with about 11 million users. Heck, this beast is huge!
The RIAA guys are paying the Bearshare company 30m right? As a compensation for redtape strongarm tactics?
I can't be the only one to notice... WebPronEws.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
wonder if i can get me $26 back....
Hard work often pays off in time, but laziness always pays off right now.
But different from the times of Teddy Roosevelt, this time they are hiding behind outdated intellectual property laws from the last century - the times when something was reproducable and distributable at great cost. The cost of reproduction and distribution of intellectual property items (mainly songs, text, publications etc) have taken a deep dive, but prices have not. They want to preserve this profit margin, and they are maintaining a rightful face because of the a century old laws.
But in fact, what they are doing is a new style of Robber Baron practice.
We need a new Teddy Roosevelt.
Read radical news here
I first learned about BearShare and LimeWire aroud the same time. Mid-2000 if memory serves. Napster had recently "gone down" and I was still in the middle of my "wow- I missed 100's of years worth of awesome music" phase.
Ok, so here come the "RIAA is evil" rants. I can accept that (after all, this is /.). However, please consider:
One of the major anti-RIAA arguments around these parts is that they don't actually do anything to benefit anyone. I agree 100%. But that said, how can we cry over a company which made ad revenues based on pirated content? Scum versus scam: who cares who wins? We are the losers.
In six years, I could have downloaded more music than I will ever have the time to listen to. Long before BearShare went down, tons of new p2p services appeared. The RIAA can keep playing "whack-a-mole" for the next 100 years (and I'm sure they intend to) but "Joe User" will *still* be "illegally" downloading and sharing the "Black album" no matter how many times the drummer of Metallica cries about it.
barack to the future?
Nothing against file sharing, but good ridance to that malware infested excuse for a file sharing app.
It is the same with the RIAA. These and DEA "folks" will keep on busting some high profile targets, but the iceberg like underground trading will forever go on
It has always been like this, and will be, even if the "boston strangler" steps in
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Reading this article brings back memories of BearShare and Napster.. the only P2P programs I used.. back when they first came out (~5 years ago!)..
BearShare probably won't shut down completely and will instead become a pay-per-song music service, much like Napster did..
However, this comes at a time when Napster is returning to providing free music.. Apparently, Napster plans on offering two million major and independent-label tracks on-demand.. The catch is that users will need to pay after downloading the same track more than 5 times.
I hate to see one of the best clients go.
It wasn't as popular becase of it's adware, but it was easily removed, had(and has) a wonderfull search, and dowloaded faster than any other client I've tried... and I've tried them all.
Lesson 1: Don't be centralized.
Philosophy.
No big deal at all. Bearshare is but a tiny fish in a HUGE ocean.
Another company gone thanks to an out-of-court settlement due to RIAA's lawyer army and economical advantage. They've really found out a working model for being right regardless what a boring test in court would say. Your tool can be used to infringe on copyright, therefore it should not exist, and no one has anything to say about the lack of logic in that argument. *AA and all those companies that live on registering, then suing for patent infrigements should merge to form a Coalition of Law Abusing Powers. Now that would be really scary... :-P Corporations that harvest the economy crops on destroying things rather than constructing. Unfortunately for the media business, they need the latter today, not the former, assuming they wish to keep their customers that is. It's a funny world when you're better supported by pirates than iTunes if you wish to use your music.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Keep this one in mind kids, it's not everyday you get a 4-step solution to easy money with all 4 steps included :)
http://slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=22181
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.
Isn't the point of P2P that it is Peer to Peer, computer to computer... How exactly does the RIAA stop Bearshare from working? If someone has the Bearshare software on their computer, and someone else does too, won't they still be allowed to share files? Isn't that the nature of file sharing? I remember Napster "shutting down" becuase the had to unplug their database servers... but P2P apps use each other to locate and share files. I'm a little confused on how Bearshare can be shutdown.
It is still a hit against data freedom, and yet another win for the 'opressive movement' and 'assumed guilt'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://www.bearshare.com/
d/l of bs clinet still active too.. as of 12:37PM PST
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Dont hold your breath for one. No one has the balls for it. ( and i dont blame them, with the way things work now )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So, in other words, if you get hit by those people you could legitimately say you got a dose of the C.L.A.P. The comparison with a disease is particularly appropriate, I think.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
RTFA
Considering that I went to Bearshare website... got the software and got a song "Let it be" by the Beatles... about 1 minute ago, I would say that the story is not exactly true.
Make it legal. After all, how much of your taxes are going on enforcement?
Deleted
I guess they couldn't "bear" the legal fees for the case.
It was a "grizzly" trial.
The RIAA really got their fur ruffed by BearShare's actions.
Lets all give "paws" and contemplate this change in the P2P landscape.
This is the end of BearShare's "tail".
The 800lb Gorilla beat the Bear!
They can be 'shut down' too.. Sue Sourceforge and prohibit them from hosting it ( or even put them out of business sinc ethey support all that software that 'supports terrorists'. Sure, a few will have it but the average guy wont be able to find it, which is who all these 'attacks' are for anyway.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They killed Bearshare! You bastards!
His premise is faulty because the ONE thing that would correct the situation. NO ONE will do! STOP BUYING THE DAMN SHIT, and STOP COPYING IT TOO! At least with the "robber barons" one could argue that what they controlled was necessary. The same can't be said for anything that's produced by the content producers. Wanted maybe, but not NEEDED!
who gets the money? Chuck
Who still uses p2p to get music?
It was closer to flesh-eating bacteria. Piracy, like the poor, will always exist. There are ways to limit the scope, though. In the case of the RIAA, hiring fewer prostitutes and spending less on cocaine would probably be an excellent start. The savings should be enough to maintain the profit margins even after slashing CD prices in half.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Whats the difference between:
a) taking a CD, ripping the song to a lower-quality format like an mp3 and then making hundreds of copies of it; and,
b) taking copyrighted printed material, and then making hundreds of photocopies of it?
Think of the billions of documents illegally photocopied every year.
By the Supreme Court's own logic, unless Xerox can find a way to prevent photocopying of copyrighted documents, they must cease and desist selling photocopiers. And since we all know thats not going to happen, I guess someone really needs to sue Xerox.
You have completely missunderstood the purpose of copyright and give undue importance to all the wrong things. If the goal of copyright is to make money for publishers, your reasoning is correct. If the goal of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", you are wrong. The original term of US copyrights was 14 years, despite the tremendous cost of publishing at the time. The goal is to spread information and culture, not to make sure a bunch of greedheads have money. As the cost of that spread declines, the time required to recoup costs diminishes and vanishes. The spirit of America is that you are free to do what you want but no one owes you a living. Exclusive franchises were hated then and should be today.
The RIAA are demanding government protection from legitimate competitors and a defacto control of culture. If you don't understand this, you don't understand how the music industry works. It's not so much your ability to get music that matters to them, it's their inability to control what you are exposed to that scares them to death. They seek to perpetuate an empire of control based on the technical limitations of 20th century broadcast and recording technology and a great deal of racketeering. Without RIAA only stores, selling junk sampled on the nations three radio networks, the world's big three music publishers start to look as good or worse than any other music publisher. Musicians and artists would then be able to market themselves freely and keep more of their earnings and the industry would collapse. Make no mistake at the level of control they seek with DRM and broadcast flags. They want the ability to limit what you are exposed to and are willing to pay for and then to squeeze you for every play while paying the artist next to nothing. The riches they earn are based on exclusion and extortion, not on the promotion of excellence and that directly contradicts the purpose of copyright.
In a world of cheap publishing there should be as many publishers as there are artists. Why not? Anyone can set up a web page. There's no longer a technical reason to reject any manuscript and not offer it to the public. The previous legitimate purpose of publishers, to chose and promote excellence, has been also co-opted by web. Copyright laws, based on paper and mechanical copy are insanely restrictive and obsolete.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In other news, bittorrent is still going strong! Experts speculate that reasons are because there are many bittorrent clients out on the market, and that the lack of a centralized structure makes it impossible for the **AA to sue anybody in particular.
The moral of the story - If you're going to file share, don't have a centralized network with windows only spyware laden clients.
Even Trey Parker and Matt Stone don't find that funny any more.
Oh My God, I Killed The Kenny Joke!
See? Not laughing.
sorry if this is a repeat, but Bearshare is still up & running. i just downloaded a file.
>suing McDonald's for $30 million.
She sued for medical expenses after McDonald's wouldn't cover them in a settlement. The rest was punitive damages from a jury of conservative Republicans instructed by a conservative Republican judge.
A lot of people miss the distinction between hot coffee and coffee that causes immediate third-degree burns.
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm
Thank you RIAA, I have a nephew that keeps "infecting" their home computers with this crap, the days of free music are gone, and so are the days of "honest" bbs filesharing. shame he didn't have a computer 14 years ago...
This is it. No more, no less.
It is not much different from the period that the nobility in 18th century france tried to hold on to their ancient 'rights' to exploit, dictate, and get their way, against the will and in expense of the people - the commons, the low, the 'subjects'.
Sure, things seem very different now, and in many respects they are - there are no more hereditary nobility that hold judiciary power on us, there is no 'unelected' persona that can pass laws that might dictate whether we should die or live, whether we should give 8/10 of our earnings to the 'state' or not.
But in some respects the thing still goes on - You have the personas/groups who have overgrown in respect to money and as a result in power.
They now dictate what we do, what we do not, through 'laws' that are passed by the people we elect - but there is a catch; we can only elect the people who can get enough money to make their publicity - we are not able to elect a person who appears in nowhere, but still a candidate. Where can the candidates get the money ? The people with the money of course. Is money given without expecting anything in return ? Very, very rarely, and not in the case of 'big businesses' for sure.
So actually we are just electing people who are the ones deemed electable by the holders of big money, big corporations and such.
And what these people are trying to ENFORCE through an organisation which have almost come to act like it IS a third of the u.s. congress, RIAA, is not much different from what british parliament had tried in 1774 - we have to hand them money, in style and in amounts that they want us to.
This is not something much different from feudal times - the one with the power, which is not 'the people' wants the people to bend to its will, for its own profit.
Whole thing is in a different disguise now for sure, there are laws, centuries old learning and practices of economy, faces that appear to be from the public but which are not - a lot of shapely differences.
But that does not change the basics of what is going on - there is something forced upon people, exorbitant prices, and outrageous ways to ensure that these prices stay.
This is in short, the people versus the overlords, again, after 250 years. We are 'the people' and they are the 'overlords'.
Read radical news here
I wonder whose the genius behind this **AA strategy. It's like trying to kill the internet
I totally agree on that point, however.
one can only imagine what the p2p world would be like if they hadnt gone after Napster and brought the concept to the attention of the masses.
Until then, few of us even knew about the idea, and few outside the hardcore groups discussed compression of multimedia.. ( mp3, etc )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One client falls, and 2 rise to take its place.
does that mean the copyright holder allows it's own infrigement of it's imaginary property and thus legitmizing the copy of copyriten material?
Didn't think so. Bearshare was a bloated, spyware-laden P2P App, with an exceptionally small userbase, in proportion to Kazaa or BitTorrent.
As a previous poster said above, the RIAA can keep playing Whack-a-mole with centralized servers, but decentralized servers -will- end up eluding them, to the point where they'll start suing each and every IP address they find downloading Music. Which would be even more of a PR nightmare than they're currently facing.
The RIAA has even distorted profit loss figures. Take the declining sales figures for music, over the last decade. We've all seen them, right?
Only, these figures don't just take into consideration CD Sales. Indeed, those are actually -increasing-, despite the Spin the RIAA will plant on it's own figures. Those 'declining' figures, are actually using Cassette and Vinyl Sales, which, I might add, have been declining for the better part of 15 years, if not longer.
What the RIAA don't want to admit, is that downloading actually -increases- sales. The RIAA, however, is diverting focus away from the real reason why sales in some area's -have- declined. The music itself. It's mostly generic, hip-hop r&b lyrics even my own mother high on crystal meth could write.
They once said, that given ifinite time, a thousand monkeys armed with typewriters would eventually write the Entire Works of William Shakespeare.
Most of these songs that get driven out?
2 Monkeys, 10 minutes.
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
Bonzi Buddy "Hey Yogi, are you still hosting servers for that P2P filesharing network?"
Yogi Bearshare "Of course, Bonzi Buddy, how else can I afford to keep buying Picnic Baskets full of food? All I have to do is help people pirate music files and show advertising in their faces as they use my malware designed application."
Bonzi Buddy "But Yogi, Ranger RIAA won't like it."
Yogi Bearshare "Forget the Ranger, Bonzi Buddy, we are going to make a fortune."
Spiney Shyster "Excuse me, are you Yogi Bearshare?"
Yogi Bearshare "Of course, are you an advertiser who wants to advertise on my P2P file sharing network?"
Bonzi Buddy "Uh oh, I don't like the sound of this Yogi."
Yogi Bearshare "Nonsense, Bonzi Buddy, so whadda ya want Mack?"
Spiney Shyster "Here is a subpeona to appear in court, Ranger RIAA is suing you for $30 Million."
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Now, I like to consider myself to have a healthy cynicism, but to me the idea that money is the only incentive to be creative... seems a little harsh.
Perhaps our tastes differ, but virtuousity in a given medium is not my standard of good art. What I enjoy the most in art is passion. You can't buy that.
-------
Incite and flee.
Bring out your Peers! Bring out your Peers!
Judge: Wait a minute, I can't take this one-he's still connected through Xlib.
RIAA: Oh he'll disconnect all-right.
BearShare: I'm still shareing!
Judge: He Said he's still active.
BearShare: I'm not disconnected yet!
RIAA: Oh be quiet, you ol' peer, you'll have neither X Server connection, files, or firewall grace by the next morning.
Judge: I can't take him like that.
BearShare: I feel like taking a walk.
RIAA: Is there anything you can do to hurry is shutdown procedure?
BearShare: I feel happy! Happy!
root@127.0.0.1:/root# killall -KILL bearshare
BearShare: Hap#$*&^
RIAA: Ah thankyou.
Judge: don't mention it.
RIAA: When will you be back in our pre-payed courthouse?
Judge: Thursday, and I'll have another stack of surver logs for you to prosecute.
RIAA: yea? The Sheeple will never suspect you are joined to the prosecution, by suboena evidence in for either party; thereby disqualifying as to be a judge, and more an executive administrator to a trust.
without prejudice
Only idiots who waste their lives gaming Slashdot's moderation system care about mod points. Go fuck yourself, John Marriot, aka Ackbar the bartender.
Well, well, well. It looks like you have changed your robots.txt to exclude searches from archive.org and google. That's too bad, I kind of liked looking at you exhort yourself to mod twitter down.
No big deal, any day's page shows how a pathetic and mean spirited loser spends his time. Mod up, Mod down! LOL, what a waste.
I wonder when you are going to be bright enough to change your site registration so you can tell would be employers you grew up and are ashamed of being such a complete asshole for so long. You do realize that site, which constitutes unlawful harassment, makes you the last person anyone would want to hire, don't you? Nah, you'll never get it. Go ahead and play your pathetic little games.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think's it's hilarious that you've "found out" all this. I suggest you do something about it, since you "know" who you're dealing with. I suppose that's unfair to whomever "Ackbar" is, but them's the dregs.
In the meantime, you're still a troll, and anyone who can click on those links can see that. By the way, have you noticed a pattern of late in your moderation? It seems that every time you post about "M$" and "Windoze" you get nailed, and yet posts like this one (the GP) which are actually not that bad, get modded up. I guess your "evangelization" campaign is not doing too good?
I do believe I am finding the /. moderation system to be a bit more fair and intelligent lately, which surprises me.
Later.
They say if you don't know your past, you don't know your future. I say that looking at the history of the music industry, the RIAA will ultimately not win. Let's go back, for a moment, to the early 60's. The music industry was entirely controlled by the "studios." They had folks come in, sit in a small room, write songs for twelve hours a day, and get paid next to nothing, and had no rights whatsoever to the songs they wrote. This practice had been going on for decades. Then, along came The Beatles. Then Jimi Hendrix. The Doors. The Rolling Stones. The music industry could not make heads or tails of this phenomenon, and so therefore had to give the artists complete creative control, because they knew they could not recreate this using the old practices. Along with creative control, the artists actually started getting paid. For about ten years, the record companies could not figure out how to reduce this thing to a formula and sell as many records as the Beatles, and so very good things were recorded and published by these record companies. After about ten years, said record companies grabbed the yoke once more, and they have been fighting that ox ever since. The RIAA is just the latest attempt to get control over this art form called music, but there will be another revolution, and it will not be televised!
If you're an artist, don't surrender your rights to anyone. If that means you need a day job to support your art, so be it. If everyone refused, the media corporations would fall in a day.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"ICBM", that's rich. You really "blasted" the "trolls" away with your "ICBM", that's for sure!
The conspiracy theorist in me is thinking it's a ruse by RIAA to lull Bearshare users into a false sense of security.
Then, when the time is right, they will begin tracking the ISPs of those people. I don't recall having seen any of those "11 year old girl charged with piracy by the RIAA" stories in a while...
Perhaps it time to rattle the saber.
"Completely" anonymous doesn't work. At the very least you can track it back to the last hop it passed.
Now, I don't see why a law couldn't be bought that makes you liable for a file that passes through you if it doesn't "have to" pass through you (so ISPs are out of the loop). Don't worry about the fine details, I'm pretty sure something could be designed. If everything fails, it will only be enforced when it "fits".
In other words, P2P systems that force a file to run through a few systems before reaching its goal won't be illegal. But nobody would run them, because they'd be hold accountable for every file passing through their system.
I wouldn't deem that impossible.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
- 38 noting you can change date/time format in preferences
- 2 how-to's on doing it.
- 1 freak who actually checked all Feb 22 back to 1995.
- 3 Y2K jokes (I actually laughed at the first one)
- 4 clueless people that wouldn't read any Informative's but still complain about the damn thing
- The other 29 are just ranting about SlashCode
Yeah. It damn feels like home.My 0.02 cents
You were on the right track, but you didn't dig deep enough.
/18 is really big). But at least you know something else. If you were to visit the webpage for its domain, you would notice it's some sort of big hosting service.
You were interrogating ARIN's whois database. It contains data about various types of entities (one being IP addresses). What you got was the data on that address. Some fields in the page you used were clickable. The logic is that the IP address belongs to a block and that block has an owner (and many other relationships). Should you have clicked on a block name, like NET-72-51-0-0-1, you would have gotten more information:
OrgName: Peer 1 Network Inc.
OrgID: PER1
Address: 2nd Floor, 75 Broad Street
City: New York
StateProv: NY
PostalCode: 10004
Country: US
NetRange: 72.51.0.0 - 72.51.63.255
CIDR: 72.51.0.0/18
NetName: PEER1-BLK-08
NetHandle: NET-72-51-0-0-1
Parent: NET-72-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1VAN.PEER1.NET
NameServer: NS2VAN.PEER1.NET
(......)
Which itself refers to even more data.
Now, in this case it looks like an ISP (a
You should also take in consideration that it is possible to make a domain lookup (if you ask the right whois server), so you could also find out what "oingo.com" is.
Also, GP also recommended finding its mail servers (it's a DNS lookup for MX records, if you don't know how, you need to RTFM).
GPG 0x1B479C78
What happens if I've had it installed for over a year. . .this reminds me of Kazaa Lite K++, even after it was taken off servers if you had the program already you were still set. What are they really accomplishing?
Link here: http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
Why would I want 96kb individual songs when I could be downloading entire albums at 256kb?
Meh.
"Grokster, sued by an alliance of Hollywood film studios and recording companies five years ago, agreed last year to pay $50m (£27m) to settle the wrangle." Oooooooh, ok. File sharing is so detrimental to the film and music business that they'll settle for 1.5x the salary of a Brad Pitt feature.
I've lost a few hours fixing the computers of friends who installed BearShare and were suddenly snowed in with adware/spyware/malware. I'm no RIAA supporter, but even a broken clock's right twice a day.