LimeWire finally out of limes

Philip
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LimeWire, one of the world's most popular peer-to-peer filesharing websites, has been shut down after a four-year legal battle with the US music industry.

A federal court in New York issued a "permanent injunction" against LimeWire late on Tuesday, ruling that the platform intentionally caused a "massive scale of infringement" by permitting the sharing of thousands of copyrighted works by its 50 million monthly users.

Founded in 2000 by Mark Gorton, a former Wall Street trader, LimeWire is now restricted from allowing the searching and sharing of copyrighted material. The website will continue "working with the music industry to move forward", a LimeWire spokeswoman confirmed.

US judge Kimba Wood ruled that record companies "have suffered – and will continue to suffer – irreparable harm from LimeWire's inducement of widespread infringement of their works", adding that the potential damages were "staggering".

The court also ruled that LimeWire should "use all reasonable technological means to immediately cease and desist" copyright infringements still taking place through applications already downloaded.

Yesterday's court order comes after a four-year legal battle between LimeWire and the Recording Industry Association of America, the representative body for many of the world's largest record labels.

In May, Wood found LimeWire liable for widespread copyright infringement. The level of damages faced by the site's New York-based parent company, Lime Group, will be decided in January 2011.

The RIAA said LimeWire has cost the music industry hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

According RIAA figures, US recorded music sales fell to $7.7bn in 2009 from $14.5bn in 1999. The rise to prominence of peer-to-peer filesharing networks is singled out as a primary factor for this decline by the RIAA.

The site's popularity is reflected in a survey by NDP Group, which found that LimeWire was used by 58% of people who have downloaded music from a peer-to-peer network in the year from May 2009.

Following Tuesday's injunction, the RIAA said: "For the better part of the last decade, LimeWire and Gorton have violated the law.

"The court has now signed an injunction that will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that LimeWire and Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely.

"In January, the court will conduct a trial to determine the appropriate level of damages necessary to compensate the record companies for the billions and billions of illegal downloads that occurred through the LimeWire system."

Earlier this year, LimeWire planned to release a service called Spoon, which would allow users to legally purchase copyrighted tracks. The deal fell through, however, when record labels were told that the site would need at least a year to migrate illicit filesharers to the new service.

Napster, which claimed more than 100 million users at the height of its popularity at the beginning of the decade, collapsed in 2002 under the strain of a number of legal challenges.

The company reinvented itself as a legal download service in 2004, later launching what it claimed was "the world's largest and most comprehensive MP3 store", before unveiling a "freemium" model – similar to that of Spotify – last year.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... -shut-down
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Pete
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nobody cares
"He has to be larger than bacon"
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Gavin Scott
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Pete!

Well, you're right though, I really don't.

My culture-shift happened with Spotify, to the extent that I now pay around £120 per year for a premium sub, where I can honestly say I haven't spent money on music for really the last 5. Maybe £20 in that time. How they distribute that cash is up to them, but I get what I want and my conscience is clear.

So, there's money to be made outwith the "purchase from iTunes" model to which I'll never subscribe - so they've at least got something out of me.
Alexia
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I care... but only because it's been a valuable resource for rare white-label remixes and other out-of-print tracks that I just have not been able to find anywhere else.
Philip
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Alexia wrote:I care... but only because it's been a valuable resource for rare white-label remixes and other out-of-print tracks that I just have not been able to find anywhere else.
Exactly what I used it for.
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WillPS
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Alexia wrote:I care... but only because it's been a valuable resource for rare white-label remixes and other out-of-print tracks that I just have not been able to find anywhere else.
Never got an OiNK account then?
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Alexia
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WillPS wrote:
Alexia wrote:I care... but only because it's been a valuable resource for rare white-label remixes and other out-of-print tracks that I just have not been able to find anywhere else.
Never got an OiNK account then?
Please elaborate - I'm a sucker for comedy acronyms.

Incidentally this is only the third ever P2P program I've used - Napster, WinMx and Limewire.
Dr Lobster*
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i actually just search on google for the song i want and download the mp3 of it, just like the good old days (like way back in 1999 when it took an hour for a single song).

does anybody remember using mirc to download mp3s (using @find) and those dreaded ftp sites which used "ratios" (so you had to upload as much as you downloaded etc)?

i stopped using limewire ages ago, it was just full of viruses.
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martindtanderson
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No one made the obvious joke? LimeWire is to become a Lemon!
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WillPS
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Alexia wrote:
WillPS wrote:
Alexia wrote:I care... but only because it's been a valuable resource for rare white-label remixes and other out-of-print tracks that I just have not been able to find anywhere else.
Never got an OiNK account then?
Please elaborate - I'm a sucker for comedy acronyms.

Incidentally this is only the third ever P2P program I've used - Napster, WinMx and Limewire.
OiNK was once the definitive BitTorrent/peer-to-peer tracker. It ended up being taken down on the weird charge of "conspiracy to defraud the music industry". Almost immediately after it went down a string of wannabes essentially rehashed what it once was ('the hydra effect'), What and Waffles being the two which took off and remain to this day. I wont link to them in case that in some way constitutes breaking a rule (God knows how many CD sales and FM radio stations would be lost!).
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cwathen
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When (the original) Napster died in 2002 a line would appear to have been drawn under easy illegal filesharing. Yet Limewire has simply ended up becoming an evolution of what Napster were doing 10 years ago. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if another big P2P program comes to the same notoriety over the next couple of years.

Apart from that, BitTorrent is gaining in popularity (especially with powerful yet friendly clients like Vuze which can search many torrent sites simulatenous and present all the results as one) and the nature of it makes it a much harder nut to crack.
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