The latest salvo in the BPI's ongoing campaign against music piracy, the letters were designed to send a clear message to file sharers - people who exchange pre-recorded music over the internet - that as far as the major record labels were concerned, file sharing was no different from shoplifting.

On behalf of its client, the British Phonographic Industry, Wiggin, a high-powered media law firm specialising in the protection of music copyright, had just sent 30 similar letters to households across Britain. I thought: someone's messing me about.'īut the letter was deadly serious. 'I don't even use the computer - it's for my daughter. The network is monitored and only free content is available, with options to pay to download music.īearShare has also become a social networking forum where you can make new friends and share content from music libraries.'It said I'd been caught illegally downloading music off the internet and had to pay a £2,500 fine or else go to prison,' said Mrs Price yesterday, still recoiling from the shock. They verified files that were uploaded so as not to infringe copyright laws no files above 50mb in size or longer than 15 minutes in length could be uploaded, only video and audio content could be uploaded and no exes or RAR files to eliminate any transfers of full length movies. in 2005, BearShare and its assets were moved to MusicLab, LLC and with the 2006 version 6 release BearShare no longer used the Gnutella protocol but another legal P2P network.īearShare v6 included updates which changed the way previous version of the application worked. Due to a lawsuit against Free Peers, Inc. BearShare was launched in 2000 and used the Gnutella-based peer-to-peer network. BearShare is a free, file sharing application used to download/upload video and audio content, as well as play the content via its in-built media player.

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