BearShare to Pay $30 Million To Prevent Lawsuit
The developers and operators of the BearShare online file-sharing service have decided to payout $30 million to avoid being sued for copyright violations.
In addition, Free Peers Inc., which distributed this application, has also decided to stop their operations and would no longer be operating any unlicensed online music services.
They were one of the seven software companies developing and providing p2p software products who were sued by the recording industry last fall.
Developers of i2Hub and WinMX have already closed their operations and Grokster agreed to payout $50 million to settle that copyright infringement case.
The remaining four companies are Warez P2P, Limewire, eDonkey, and Soulseek.
As part of this latest announcement, Free Peers would be selling off their technology and would also give away rights to the BearShare domain name and data on users of the software.