BearShare
The bear on the desktop, the search box full of misspelled MP3s, and the toolbar nobody remembered installing. Free Peers' BearShare rode the Gnutella network from December 2000 until a $30 million settlement with the record labels ended it in 2006, and in a lot of houses it was the reason the family computer got slow.
BearShare launched on December 4, 2000, from Free Peers, Inc., a Gnutella client run by Vincent Falco and Louis Tatta. It arrived in Napster's shadow and found its audience the way most of that generation did: a free download, a search box, a results list of MP3s shared from other people's hard drives, and a friendly bear logo that made the whole thing feel harmless. The free version carried adware; a Pro version sold for $24, and the difference between the two was the beginning of BearShare's reputation as the program that came with something extra.
That reputation is the memory. Among the file-sharing clients of the early 2000s, BearShare became shorthand for the sluggish family PC, the toolbar nobody asked for, and the pop-ups that followed, whether or not BearShare was actually the culprit on any given machine.
The end came through the courts. After the Supreme Court's Grokster decision of June 27, 2005, BearShare's community forums closed abruptly while Free Peers negotiated with the RIAA; that fall it was one of seven file-swapping companies sent letters telling them to shut down or face suit. On May 4, 2006, court filings laid out the deal: Free Peers would pay $30 million, close up shop, and never run an unlicensed music service again, selling BearShare's technology, domain name, and user data to a subsidiary of iMesh, which had settled its own case for $4.1 million and relaunched the year before as a licensed service. Grokster had agreed to pay $50 million the previous fall; i2Hub and WinMX had simply shut down.
The name outlived the network. On August 17, 2006, iMesh's MusicLab released BearShare 6, a reskinned iMesh that connected to iMesh's own network rather than Gnutella and sold copy-protected WMA downloads alongside free MP3s. That licensed BearShare lingered until June 12, 2016, when the download finally disappeared, but the BearShare people remember is the earlier one: free, slightly dangerous, and always running in the background.
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