Following the fall of Napster, Kazaa and Morpheus, LimeWire rose to fill the void left in the P2P file-sharing 'market'. Following years of unsuccessful legal wrangling, though, a US court has finally ordered the service to shut down its relay servers.
The software is still widely used and is said to be the number one client to use the Gnutella network by a significant margin. However, despite efforts by the parent company to begin selling legal music through the client and prominent warnings that downloaded files 'may' infringe copyright laws, around 98.8 per cent of all downloads on the network infringed copyright laws.
Following the precedent set out in the Grokster decision, the presiding judge explained that:
"LimeWire... (1) is aware that LimeWire's users commit a substantial amount of copyright infringement; (2) markets LimeWire to users predisposed to committing infringement; (3) ensures that LimeWire enables infringement and assists users committing infringement; (4) relies on the fact that LimeWire enables infringement for the success of its business; and (5) has not taken meaningful steps to mitigate infringement."
Of course, it didn't help matters that the owners ran a Google AdWords marketing campaign based on search terms including "replacement napster" and "mp3 free download".
Being a US-based service and company, the court will have no trouble in shutting it down and it's believed that the search and relay servers have already been disconnected from the network. This means that the client will be unable to find other file-sharers.
While company representatives expressed disappointment with the ruling, there have been no announced plans to fight the decision. However, Lime Company CEO George Searle has expressed a desire to work with the music industry in developing a completely legal music platform.
Obviously this is a relatively major win for record labels, which were unsurprisingly overjoyed by the victory. Nonetheless, it represents only a very small step in the fight against illegal file sharers and is unlikely to stop determined users from downloading music without paying for it.
The full 59 page decision is available to read on scribd and a conference with the Judge is now planned for June 1 as the final stage in the proceedings. Further coverage can be found on the Wall Street Journal's MediaMemo blog.
