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Looks Like the End of the Line For LimeWire
tekgoblin writes with news that a federal judge has issued a permanent injunction against LimeWire for copyright infringement and unfair competition. A notice on the LimeWire home page says "THIS IS AN OFFICIAL NOTICE THAT LIMEWIRE IS UNDER A COURT-ORDERED INJUNCTION TO STOP DISTRIBUTING AND SUPPORTING ITS FILE-SHARING SOFTWARE. DOWNLOADING OR SHARING COPYRIGHTED CONTENT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION IS ILLEGAL." An anonymous reader points to coverage at CNET, too.
I'm pretty sure that the closure of limewire will cause the amount of malware in the wild to drop dramatically.
I'm still using iMesh and WinMX.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Frostwire's still up. http://www.frostwire.com/. Limewire != Gnutella, which is decentralized and thus impossible to shut down completely.
On a related note, I can't believe how stupid this ruling is. It's a Gnutella client! That's it! Limewire is responsible for nothing; it's the illegal distributors of copyrighted works, which LimeWire isn't, that are legally responsible for any of this. What's next, making HTTP/FTP/BitTorrent/the Internet illegal because it "encourages illegal file-sharing"? Give me a break! Some of the best legal to download music I've found was promoted by Frostwire! The problem isn't file-sharing, obviously, but an outdated business model and a resistance to change.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Actually people should continue making shitty file sharing services and basing them in the US. That way the *IAA's of this world can feel like they're winning even as they are completely unable to do anything about torrent.
...And while you're at it, make those programs easier to use than torrent, so all the newbies make them popular and it seems like BIG NEWS when one gets whacked on the head with a hammer!
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
From the cnet article:
"RIAA lawyers have told the judge that LimeWire costs the record labels about $500 million in lost music sales every month."
So with LimeWire shut down, will record sales increase by $500 million every month? Hopefully they will use current sales figures including the 2 months AFTER the shutdown to calculate the lost sales prior to the shutdown and not just take the RIAA lawyers word for it. My guess is they will see little, if any, sales difference after the shutdown.
Even easier fix - if a service is "Common Carrier", it is not responsible for the content on it. That is why phone services can't be sued if someone does something illegal over them, same with the post office. (Which is one big reason it's Bad Juju for ISPs to differentiate between users. If they aren't Common Carrier, they ARE liable for content. Same as newspapers or magazines are, even if the author of an article isn't a member of the staff. They're not Common Carriers, they select. Slashdot isn't liable for comments again because they're Common Carrier - they're not selecting who can post and everyone plays by the same rules - even though in many ways they look like a newspaper.)
In the Old Days, when people used Archie to find files, the authors of FTP and Archie weren't liable for a damn thing. Common Carriers. LimeWire is perceived (right or wrong) as not a Common Carrier. Fix that perception (if necessary by fixing the code) and the law will protect it in every country that recognizes the notion. (Which is most of them, US included.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Actually I've found it was up to this day VERY popular with the clueless. As a PC repairman I ask my fellow repairmen to bow their heads in a silent moment and give thanks to the HUGE number of viruses from the fake files on Limewire and Kazaa, which made many of us mucho money. Hell the whole thing was plumb full of "name_of_popular_song.mp3.exe" viruses that the clueless would fall for time and time again.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Actually that does matter. In Bernstein v. United_States the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that source code is Constitutionally protected speech.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Actually people should continue making shitty file sharing services and basing them in the US. That way the *IAA's of this world can feel like they're winning even as they are completely unable to do anything about torrent.
The *IAA's don't want to win. Winning would mean a marginal increase in new sales (from the downloaders who actually can afford the stuff they download), but a sharp decrease in profits from extremely punitive lawsuits. Their optimal move is to continue playing both ends of the game (dues from artists paying essentially protection fees and settlements/damages from lawsuits). All they really have to do is continue lobbying enough to keep the status quo and drown out any artists that attempt to call them out.