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

History

Bearshare was a Gnutella-based peer-to-peer file sharing application, with a support forum.

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, LLC. (an iMesh subsidiary).

On 17 August 2006, MusicLab released BearShare v6, a new application unrelated to the original, 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.

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 fewer features than the Free version. The Pro version had more features than both the Free and Lite versions, but cost 24 dollars.

BearShare offers paid music downloads in the DRMed WMA format as well as free content in various formats, mostly MP3. The free content is shared by users and is automatically verified by BearShare not to infringe. This verification is done using acoustic fingerprinting. Also, video files more than 50mb in size and 15 minutes in length cannot be shared, guaranteeing feature-length releases cannot be transferred across the network. No other content than music and video files can be shared, which excludes executable files and zip archives amongst others.

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

External links

• BearShare Official Website
• McAfee's Bearshare Analysis prior to v6