Bear Share

Anyone heard of this BearShare program before ?? Was recommended to me over the weekend. Basically it allows you to download music for free in exchange for your music files been available for download to others.
Is this not illegal ??

yes! And check out the www.IRMA.ie for the consequences.

my understanding is that the program itself is not available. Using it to upload or download copyrighted material is illegal. nothing wrong with using it to share your non-copyrighted music and other non-copyrighted files.

non copyright file transfer is fine.

Information about Bearshare can be found on their [broken link removed]. In recent years, a lot of the P2P filesharing networks have been moving towards their activities, but the fact remains that — like BitTorrent networks — the vast majority of their users are swapping copyrighted materials — illegally. Even the so-called 'hubs', which until now had got around such concerns by posting only information, not hosting files, seem to be under increasing pressure.

The question has attracted a bit more attention in Ireland recently (see the 'breaking news' section of the IRMA website linked to above...)

Please keep discussion of this topic to the hypothetical aspects of the technology and its legalities. AAM doesn't condone illegal activity of any kind, and posts which offer too much 'how-to' information or which endorse illegal filesharing will be deleted.

sandrabing

See extract from Enigma's support website:

"In the spyware world, many filesharing programs are amongst the worst of the infectors! Kazaa Media Desktop, iMesh, LimeWire, BearShare, and Grokster are known to install parasites and spyware. This is how they are able to offer a FREE program to the public" www.enigmasoftwaregroup.com

I would not recommend that you install Bear Share on your PC, illegalities aside, it -and the associated parasite programs- are very difficult to remove and often require specialist tools to remove completely.

[broken link removed]

Not all filesharing utilities install parasites and malware although I do believe bearshare is one that does.

Also, file sharing maybe the way forward for marketing.