Bearshare

Bearshare and other Peer to Peer Services

Until early 2006, Bearshare made a name for itself as a sort of a second coming of the original Napster. In 2006, the people who owned and operated Bearshare agreed to pay a huge settlement to the RIAA, forcing the company to close their doors on the original version of the program.

More recently, Bearshare has been relaunched as a channel by which internet users can exchange free or open content, as well as buying or subscribing to paid content.

What’s interesting is that services like Limewire, Rapidshare, and The Pirate’s Bay manage to remain in business while allowing users to trade software, music, and other media which violates every copyright law on the books.

The way that these services can “get away with it” is simple; file sharing is legal.

It’s not file sharing that’s the problem, the problem is that people use file sharing to trade pirated media and software. There is nothing inherently unethical or illegal about simply trading things on the internet. As we’ve seen with the growing open source and open music communities, there is a whole heck of a lot of free, legal content to be traded. For example, Trent Reznor’s latest album was released as open content as a sort of gift for his fans. The album wasn’t even released in CD form, rather, it was released under copyleft protection online, for free. Now, if you want to trade that album back and forth with others on the internet, there is absolutely nothing illegal or unethical about that, because that is exactly what Reznor intended to happen when he released the album.

Likewise, there are dozens of rare songs and movies and books that are in the public domain and can only really be found easily on these peer to peer trading networks.

Why do some of these services go down while others stay up?

Honestly, some of that may be the luck of the draw, but part of it is the fact that services like Limewire do not openly endorse the trading of pirated goods. Napster made some missteps right off the bat, when the owner went on record stating that software and music piracy can actually be helpful for record sales. Ironically, he was telling the truth. The band Radiohead was always a sort of obscure little group until one of their singles was pirated and traded around on Napster. When the album was finally released, they saw greater record sales than they ever had before. This is kind of beside the point though. The point is that the owner pretty much had openly confessed that, yes, Napster can be used to share copyright infringing content, and that the owner is okay with that.

It might not explain it all the way, but part of why Limewire and other services stay in business can be partially attributed to the fact that they do not openly endorse the pirating or illegal trading of software, music, and other media.

By stopping all peer to peer networks from operating, the US government would not really be making a case against copyright infringement so much as a case against trading, and we all know that trading one service for another, trading goods for money, or trading money for services, is kind of the backbone of any healthy, thriving economy. Trading is not the problem, the problem is the trading of copyright infringing content, and, sadly, there isn’t always a whole lot that the owners of these services can do about that.

Piracy may never end. We’re probably going to see people copying CDs for as long as the format exists. We’re probably going to see people taking something for nothing for as long as anyone is offering something for nothing.

It’s hard to argue that stealing music or software online is truly ethical, but it’s equally hard to argue that it’s okay to stop legitimate trading as a means of stopping illegitimate trading.

Right now, the water is kind of cloudy on the issue, from both an ethical and a legal perspective. Technically, Limewire and Rapidshare haven’t done anything illegal, even if they facilitate illegal activity. But it may be that the owners of Limewire are no more responsible for that than you can blame a city planner for the people who got mugged walking down one of the alleyways he’d laid out. It’s not really a black and white issue.