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LimeWire shut down

28 October 2010

Limewire, one of the world's biggest file-sharing websites, has been shut down by a US judge after a four-year legal battle.

In a huge victory for the record industry, New York District Judge Kimba Wood issued a permanent injunction, ordering the service to stop supplying its software and to block the sharing of unauthorised files.

The 17-page ruling requires LimeWire to 'disable the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality of the software.'

The decision puts an end to one of the world's biggest services for allowing consumers to share music, movies and TV shows for free over the internet.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which filed the copyright complaint against Lime Wire and its founder Mark Gorton in 2007, will now seek damages that could easily top $1billion.

RIAA lawyers told the judge that LimeWire cost the record labels about $500 million a month in lost revenue by helping users swop more than 3 billion songs a month.

They claimed Limewire's software had been downloaded from the pirates' site more than 200 million times, and 98.8 per cent of download requests were for unauthorised files.

They described Limewire's actions as "rampant" copyright infringement on a "massive scale".

LimeWire has said it has more than 50 million monthly users. These users accounted for 58 percent of people who said they downloaded music from a peer-to-peer service in 2009, a survey by NPD Group showed.

As technology and broadband speeds have improved, LimeWire has also been used to illegally share movies and popular TV shows, attracting criticism from Hollywood as well.

The RIAA said in a statement: '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 Lime Wire and Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely.'

The RIAA's legal action was backed by major record labels including Arista, Atlantic, Capitol, Elektra, Interscope, Motown, Sony and Warner.

LimeWire’s fall from grace mirrors the fate of Napster which was forced to start charging for its legal download service after a similar ruling.

LimeWire's software was released 10 years ago and quickly emerged as one of the favorite ways to pass pirated music across the Web. Gorton and his company have acknowledged making millions from offering the service.

Lime Wire continues to exist but no longer operates as a file-sharing service, a spokesperson said.

A Lime Wire spokesperson said in a statement: 'While this is not our ideal path, we look forward to embracing necessary changes and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future.'

Many alternative file-sharing programmes and networks are still available. In the injunction, software such as FrostWire, MP3Rocket, and BitTorrent clients including uTorrent are described as 'similar' and could become the record companies' next target.

BitTorrent has emerged over the last few years as an even more popular way to share files than Limewire. It operates on the Gnutella network which has not been affected by the ruling.

Meanwhile, the Swedish Appeal Court in Stockholm is due to announce on November 26 whether or not Swedish file sharing website Pirate Bay is guilty of copyright infringement.

Pirate Bay's legal defence is that its owners were not guilty of breaking any copyright infringement laws because their website did not host any copyrighted material.

Source: The Register