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."

Comments

Re:Why spare the big fish?

[larry bagina]

Some of the index servers have been seized recently.

Re:RIAA = New entourage of robber barons

[Anonymous Coward]

The loss of Eldred_v._Ashcroft was bad enough. Essentially Congress now has unlimited power.

Having Supreme Court Justicies like Ruth Bader Ginsburg 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 project getting sued (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 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.

Re:Why spare the big fish?

[TubeSteak]

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

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.

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 and you can even still download the installer. As long as people still have the client, the RIAA hasn't "shut down" anything.