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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.
Talk about a blast from the past.
I'm pretty sure that the closure of limewire will cause the amount of malware in the wild to drop dramatically.
If only there were some way for people who had Limewire to share the executable.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
The base LimeWire client is also open source, released under the GPL.
Breakfast served all day!
That I prefer to use Frostwire.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
I'm still using iMesh and WinMX.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Piracy is solved forever.
Can someone tell the judge to not use so many caps? It's like YELLING!
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 The problem isn't file-sharing, obviously, but an outdated business model and a resistance to change.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!
With AOL, you can get the internet in your living room!
So I hope you have a really, really big living room.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
The media companies have stood up against rampant piracy to protect artistic expression and innovation! This is truly a victory for The American People.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
It's the end of the lime for them alright, and it's sad to see such a historic piece of software going out on a such a sour note.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Steve_Goldberg Even the picture there is kind of disturbing.
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.
A lot of those are actually bots that listen for any query and based on it, return a plausable sounding result that really points at a virus.
profits from extremely punitive lawsuits.
Would you believe that they actually lose money on that shit? Lawyers aren't cheap, especially evil lawyers (even though they make up most of the supply).
That is patently false.
Actually correct. Check out Ray Beckerman's blog if you want some more information on that subject. If you're using a Gnutella-style network and you turn off sharing you aren't distributing anything. So far as I've been able to tell, all of the 30,000-odd RIAA lawsuits have been about illegal distribution, not downloading.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The advantage of P2P's like Limewire was that it did not share crappy_commercial_music.mp3 while you were downloading crappy_commercial_music.mp3, and as such you could not be fingered for the crime of distributing crappy_commercial_music.mp3 since you were in fact not distributing it.
Uhhh...yeah, and clearly your "logic" with "one-way" downloading of illegal content somehow saved them from a legal injunction...
You're confused. The GP wasn't talking about why Limewire got screwed by the courts, that was an entirely different matter. He is, in fact, talking about the Limewire user base, and there he is correct, at least for those users with a functioning cerebral cortex. The bulk of RIAA lawsuits were for people that stupidly didn't turn off file sharing on their various Gnutella clients (Limewire being only one of many) and "helpful" clients that automatically shared everything they downloaded, thereby making targets out of their users. Downloading isn't where the illegality came it: it was the illegal distribution of copyright materials.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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...
No.
Slashdot isn't liable for certain kinds of "illegal" material (namely, defamation - i.e., libel) because of section 230 of the Telecom Act of '96. Basically, because it is a "provider of an interactive computer service," and because comments and even stories are provided by "another information content provider" (i.e., users like you and me), Slashdot is immune from any liability it would normally have for being the publisher or speaker of "illegal speech" (like defamation, but potentially also intrusions on privacy and the like).
Section 230 *does not* provide immunity for copyright infringement - instead, the DMCA's notice and take-down system gives Slashdot immunity so long as it promptly takes down infringing material after being served notice by the copyright owner. A common carrier, however, would (I think) be immune to liability for copyright infringement even with notice that a user was using its service to infringe copyrights.
Both of those safe harbors (230 and the DMCA notice and take-down) look a lot like the protections normally given to common carriers - so it's understandable that you might think that that's what they are. But its not the case. Slashdot cannot be a common carrier because it does more than "carry." It chooses what stories to publish on its website, and that kind of discretion means that it doesn't provide "common" access to its service. Further, as another poster points out, common carrier status has to be provided by law; one doesn't qualify for common carrier protections just by adhering to a certain kind of business practice.
Hi. Let me walk you through turning the fucking file sharing off, since you are apparently TOO NAIVE to have looked through the entire thing in order to understand the workings of the system.
You first install it (ignore the ask toolbar as always, uncheck it and move on)
When it FIRST LOADS UP, it asks you where you want to download, and which folders you want to share - uncheck all the folders under 'shared' box, click them and hit 'remove,' and pick your download location or leave it default, click next.
Tell Limewire your connection type, click next.
A couple more menus in, it will ask you what file types you'd like to share directly with LimeWire itself, uncheck all of those, click next.
Before you've even had the opportunity to download anything, you've been given the options to turn off ALL SHARING.
You are no longer sharing files and will not upload whatever you download.
Was it that hard? You didn't even have to look for a settings menu, THE INNER WORKINGS THAT MATTER THE MOST TO YOU ARE EXPOSED TO YOU BEFORE YOU ARE ALLOWED TO DO ANYTHING.
Don't speak unless you've actually used the program, please. I re-installed it A. for nostalgia and B. to prove you know absolutely nothing of which you speak.
Frostwire (the free 'pro' version of Limewire) has the EXACT SAME PROCEDURE, as does any faithful open-source LimeWire clone using LimeWire's open-source.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It in fact HAS to be about distribution.
Imagine the scenario where they try to jack you up for downloading crappy_commercial_music.mp3.
Defense: "How do you know I downloaded it?"
Plaintiff: "Its in our logs"
Defense: "How do you have logs of this event?"
Plaintiff: "We were offering crappy_commercial_music.mp3 for download"
Judge: "Case dismissed"
"His name was James Damore."