Slashdot Mirror
LimeWire Likely To Shut Down Soon
suraj.sun quotes from a CNET story: "A federal court judge has likely dealt a death blow to LimeWire, one of the most popular and oldest file-sharing systems, according to legal experts. On Wednesday ... US District Judge Kimba Wood granted summary judgment in favor of the ... [RIAA], which filed a copyright lawsuit against LimeWire in 2006. In her decision, Wood ruled Lime Group, parent of LimeWire software maker Lime Wire, and founder Mark Gorton committed copyright infringement, induced copyright infringement, and engaged in unfair competition. 'It is obviously a fairly fatal decision for them,' said [an industry defense lawyer]. 'If they don't shut down, the other side will likely make a request for an injunction and there's nothing left but to go on to calculating damages.'" The article notes that LimeWire is used by nearly 60% of the people who download songs.
And nothing of value was lost. Seriously, who uses an inefficient cruddy program like Limewire when you've got bit torrent?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
...in 3, 2, 1
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
As the title says; 60 percent!? Really? Except for my girlfriend (wich by the way stopped using it when she met me because I recommended better protocols) I don't know anyone who's using it or have been using it.
I stopped using Limewire years ago after downloading a few nasty viruses and hundreds of low quality and incomplete music. Free music was no longer worth my trouble. I switched to iTunes and legal music purchases and have never looked back.
It's not like the Gnutella network will shut down. Even if LimeWire stops distributing its client, there are plenty of others. For example, FrostWire.
Limewire has been around for years and they've only now just got around to trying to close the thing down?
Next thing they will be turning down is WinMX. With audiogalaxy gone, things look all gloom and doom for P2P music downloads.
Yeah but will they be able to pierce the corporate veil and hold the CEO personally accountable? Otherwise his company becomes worthless and he keeps all the money that he's been paid in salary.
That number seems either misleading or bullshit. Earlier reports were saying that the vast majority of peer-to-peer filesharing goes through BitTorrent, and now a different network is supposed to have more than half of the traffic?
Perhaps they mean 60% of the non-torrent traffic?
The sooner we get these people off Limewire and onto Bittorrent, the sooner I can stop having to clean trojans off my friends PCs every few weeks.
That's a good thing. I wish they could stop all illegal downloads of music, videos and software. When people finally can't download any free content from the mafia (i.e. content industry) the people will finally see how expensive and restricted the legal alternative is and turn to free and independent sources.
Imagen, if you can't download Windows, Photoshop or MS Office anymore. Maybe than people will see and embrace the free alternatives which are more than sufficient for at least 99% of the users. The same with music, that people can discover that there are plenty of independent music bands with music good as on MTV. And there is plenty of DRM free games, a few free to download, like the http://mashable.com/2009/10/20/world-of-goo-huge-success/
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
For those of you who have a reason to avoid torrents. Shareaza is an excellent (clean and superior) alternative. ( http://shareaza.sourceforge.net/ ). It supports eDonkey2000, Gnutella, Gnutella2 and handles bitTorrent acceptably. It is free software (GPL).
windows only (kinda works on wine)
And what is Google doing during each of these cases. As the RIAA wages battle against these smaller search engines (because, really, that's what they are) and wins, they are building an ever-increasingly large portfolio of prior case law. Eventually the RIAA are going to decide that enough cases have gone their way that they can wage the real battle - to go after Google (and Bing and Yahoo). I am shocked that Google's legal department is just sitting and watching these cases unfold without offering assistance. Then again, I'm not a lawyer nor a multi-billion dollar corporation so what do I know?...
Its the gnutella network.
There are already a half-a-dozen alternative clients.
But do alternative clients provide their own set of Gnutella Web Cache servers? Without one, a client doesn't know of any active nodes accepting connections into the network.
There is a crucial difference between how lawyers and engineers view the issue:
To an engineer, the content of a digital file is the primary attribute. Two files with identical contents are indistinguishable and interchangeable.
To a lawyer, the pedigree of a digital file just as important as the content. Two identical files with different histories are different entities.
What this means is that if you and your friend each own a copy of the same album, you may feel it is reasonable to copy data from his disk when convenient, since you legally own a copy with the exact same contents. In the eyes of the law, however, those song files are NOT the same, because they have different histories. The rights you have to your copy do not extend to all other instances of that file, even if they are indistinguishable or not.
It's easy to say that the lawyer view is ridiculous, but (a) that is the view that defines the law, and (b) it seems far less ridiculous after one studies the history of copyright law beginning in the 1500s.
There is a good article on this subject:
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php
From Reuters:
First, the judge found Gorton, who is also LimeWire's sole director, personally liable for infringement, observing in her ruling that "an individual, including a corporate officer, who has the ability to supervise infringing activity and has a financial interest in that activity, or who personally participates in that activity is personally liable for infringement."
That will likely strike fear in the hearts of would-be P2P moguls who may have been clinging to the belief that they could hide behind corporate shells, insulating their own assets if the law ever caught up with them.
Ruling could have chilling effect on P2P services
What the fuck is he talking about? LimeWire is just one client... just one client... for the Gnutella network.
There are many many others! Hell, take a ready-made gnutella library and build your own one in no time!
Gnutella is not going anywhere, as it, being completely decentral, can’t be killed.
My bet is on TFA being MAFIAA FUD.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
What defines the law is what the population will put up with. If no one will put up with the lawyer's bullshit view then it's unenforceable.
What defines what the population will put up with is what the major publishers, through the news media, tell the population to put up with. For example, every major commercial TV news channel in the United States (CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, and CNN) shares a parent company with one of the big six movie distributors (Paramount, Disney, Universal, Fox, and Warner).
As the title says; 60 percent!? Really?
From Download.com.
Total LimeWire client downloads: 206 million.
Total last week: 320,000.
Total uTorrent client downloads: 8 million.
Total last week: 61,000.
P2P & File-Sharing Software
Actually, NOD32 flagged that...
5/16/2010 10:15:20 PM
HTTP filter file
http://cristgaming.com/pirate.swf BAT/ZEP.A virus
connection terminated - quarantined
Threat was detected upon access to web by the application:
A 10+ year fight against something most people use and have no moral objection to -- except a pushy minority with special interests.
History repeats itself. Ban P2P and 'elite' FTPs will reemerge with private memberships. High quality private torrent trackers already exist. Instead of joining a free P2P network you'll pay a guy in China a nominal fee for access to his file distribution network. Remember how much money pirates made in places like Thailand in the 90s just by selling things for a few dollars? All of the shady rackets will return, along with even more viruses since individual files will not be checked by large groups of people, or distributed via reliable release groups.
Ban P2P and watch real crime and extortion take place. Eventually it will be a burden on authorities to chase after 15 year olds who want the new 50 Cent CD; the RIAA won't have money to toss to lawyers either, because their income will remain just as shitty as money goes to shad(ier) sources instead.
For a decade now the biggest sites were targeted and shutdown, yet for some reason it gets easier each year to find what I need on-line. Hmm.
"The article notes that LimeWire is used by nearly 60 percent of the people who download songs."
I take it the article was written before the suit was filed then, sometime around 2003?
When I left Gnutella about 7 years ago it wasn't fully decentralized. It required Hubs (or was that Ultrapeers ?). It was also prone to spam and fake attacks because it was forwarding the query itself so that any spammer could tell you that he had the file you asked for. I eventually chose eMule because:
1) It was open source. While the eDonkey client (which eMule was initially based on) was providing better speeds and had a decentralized searchable network (Overnet) it was closed source. My decision proved wise when some years later eDonkey timebombed itself per RIAA's directive. I had a cold dish served by those eDonkey fanboys who were claiming bollocks on the open source argument.
2) It was, and still is, under heavy development. The official client is somewhat stale but modders are working constantly to improve the client. See mods such as Neo, Xtreme, MorphXT and Shark. Mod development comes mainly from Germany, Italy and some from Israel.
3) It developed its own fully decentralized network which is now standard in any installation. In fact I'm not using servers anymore.
All that combined with an anonymous VPN gives me troublefree access to anything I want. The variety of the material is simply amazing. This is far beyond your plain old piratebay copyrighted stuff:
* Old recordings that have gone out of copyright ? Of course
* Fan made movies in their highest quality (without youtube compression) ? You bet
* Service manuals ? Anytime
* I have even found scanned medieval books there that were impossible to find anywhere else on the internet or a public library (apparently some guy has got hold of these somehow and got them public).
The speeds are not great but the overall service is practically bulletproof. It's not by chance eMule has won Sourceforge awards twice in 2006 and 2007.
But the average USA p2p user has always stuck with US-made oldies like WinMX and Gnutella. I've never figured out why.
Two identical files with different histories are different entities.
So if I find a Beatles song somewhere in the Champernowne constant, am I free to keep it?
Ezekiel 23:20