BearShare

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BearShare
BearShare 6.0.2.24957
Maintainer:	Free Peers, Inc. MusicLab, LLC.
Stable release:	6.0 (September 2006) _[+/-]
Preview release:	*n/a (-) _[+/-]*
OS:	Microsoft Windows
Use:	peer-to-peer file sharing
License:	Proprietary software
Website:	http://www.bearshare.com/

BearShare is a peer-to-peer file sharing application originally created by Free Peers, Inc. for Microsoft Windows and currently sold by MusicLab, LLC.

1 History
2 Versions
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] History

Following the June 27, 2005 United States Supreme Court decision on the MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. case the BearShare support forums were closed.

On May 4, 2006, Free Peers agreed to pay $30 million in a settlement with the RIAA and transfer all their BearShare-related assets to MusicLab.^[1] (an iMesh subsidiary).

On 17 August 2006, MusicLab released BearShare v6, which does not use the Gnutella protocol at all, but instead operates on the same network as the iMesh client.

In August 2006, MusicLab released another version optimized for video download called BearFlix. The first release was version 1.2.1. BearFlix allows free downloads of videos and images.

[edit] Versions

Three variations of BearShare were distributed by Free Peers: Free, Lite and Pro. The Free version had more features than the Lite version, but also contained some malware by WhenU. The Lite version was malware-free, but had less features than than the Free version. The Pro version had more features than both the Free and Lite versions, but cost 24 dollars.

Since BearShare 6, the program is malware-free and cannot be used anymore to download arbitrary files. Instead, BearShare offers paid music downloads in the DRMed WMA format as well as free content in MP3 format. The free MP3 content is shared by users and is automatically verified by BearShare not to infringe. This verification is done using an acoustic filter.

BearShare 6 also includes social networking features, somewhat similar to MySpace.