Slashdot Mirror
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."
who actually uses bear share anyway?
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.
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.
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!
Sorry - but your premise seems rather faulty to me. The fall in cost of reproduction and distribution seems to me to make copyright laws more relevant than less so. When it was expensive to reproduce original works, the incentive to do so is minimal and copyright laws didn't matter very much unless you happened to have the rather large capital investment sitting there in the form of a Linotype machine and a web-fed printing press. With modern technologies reducing such costs, the incentive to copy becomes much greater.
No, what we have now is a classic black market situation. With the price of the goods controlled at artificially high levels through taxation or regulation there will always be an underground trade in the goods in question, whether it be in alcohol, drugs or music. There is really no way to prevent it unless you find a strong technological countermeasure.
This is yet another high-profile "victory" in the RIAA's neverending and largely ineffective propaganda campaign. Will it have any practical effect upon the popularity of file sharing? Probably not, but the RIAA looks good, and it does set a nice precedent when it comes to suing other outfits like Limewire. Too bad there's so many nice open source multi-platform Gnutella clients out there.
If the management of the RIAA's member companies were to take a long, hard look at what the RIAA has actually accomplished (e.g., alienated the customer base, eliminated profitable new recording technologies, and given the whole business a black eye, PR-wise) they might begin to wonder about the RIAA's relevance to the modern world. Although, in truth, companies like Sony have management that is just as sleazy, and are perfectly capable of alienating customers without the RIAA's dubious assistance.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
When it was expensive to reproduce original works, the incentive to do so is minimal and copyright laws didn't matter very much unless you happened to have the rather large capital investment sitting there in the form of a Linotype machine and a web-fed printing press.
You hit the nail on the head - back when the social compact of copyright was created - we, the people, did not give up much on our end of the bargain. Since, as you said, it wasn't easy to make copies back then, so giving up the inherent natural right to make copies was no big deal.
Now that copying is easy for anyone and everyone, that bargain is no longer so favorable to us, the people and we want to renegotiate.
The problem is, the entrenched copyright cartel thinks they don't have to renegotiate, that they can just dictate terms. That is a severe denial of reality on their part.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
- 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