LimeWire Lives Again

Slayer Silver Wolf writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "'On October 26 the remaining LimeWire developers were forced to shut down the company's servers and modify remote settings in the filesharing client to try to harm the Gnutella network. They were then laid off. Shortly after, a horde of piratical monkeys climbed aboard the abandoned ship, mended its sails, polished its cannons, and released it free to the community.' And so, LimeWire Pirate Edition (LPE) was born. Based on the LimeWire 5.6 beta that was briefly released earlier this year and then withdrawn when Lime Wire LLC lost its lawsuit, LPE is now in the wild. In many ways, it is better than the version killed by the RIAA."

Comments

Why

[deathtopaulw]

Limewire has been so painfully irrelevant for the past 8 years now that it laughable to even still hear the name. It's like when an old man mentions "That damn Napster" as a free music service. I can only imagine the people who still use this thing are admins just wanting to test their corporate anti-virus.

Re:Why

[martinux]

It's a wonderful reminder to the companies attempting to shut down such services that it's almost completely impossible.

I think the fact that they can say, "we're back" less than a month after a court 'killed' the service is going to be very disappointing to the RIAA/MPAA and other international equivalents.

Their legal representation probably just threw an impromptu party though.

Re:Why

[Tx]

Having an ecosystem of different file sharing software and protocols is valuable insofar as it makes it harder to prevent all file sharing. Assuming you don't want to shut down all file sharing of course. The authorities tend to focus on whatever are the protocols du jour (at the moment bittorrent and rapidshare-type file lockers), but meanwhile you have all sorts of protocols from the past like gnutella, dc++, edonkey etc still happily working away mostly under the radar. I'd guess if you're sharing stuff you'd be less likely to land an enforcement notice if you're using a more obscure protocol. Maybe you might escape notice of deep packet inspection systems and so avoid throttling by your ISP, if they have implemented that.

Just guessing, but in any case it seems sensible not to just assume that bittorrent is the apotheosis of file-sharing, and that nothing else will ever be useful.

Re:Why

[91degrees]

I make digital content.

I don't think they steal.

I'd rather they but the stuff, certainly, and would encourage then to do so but it turns out a lot of them actually do buy a decent amoutn of media as well as pirating.

Re:Why

[MightyYar]

Boo-hoo... the filthy pirates are taking away my government-granted monopoly!

Seriously, could we all grow up a little? We can have an honest discussion about copyright without resorting to name-calling.

Re:Why

[MBGMorden]

exactly... you can't catch me I'm the Gingerbread Man

Gingerbread Man or something similar would actually be a decent name for a new P2P system (if/when we ever move past Bittorrent).

It is definitely fun though seeing these groups futility playing their little game of whack-a-mole.

Re:Why

[MBGMorden]

True, but some trackers will not allow you to seed more than a certain number of torrents before it stops accepting connections from you. I've had this happen several times before when all my torrents went dead for a few days until I noticed that the tracker was sending back a "Too many torrents" error message. Pruning the list of active torrents a bit returned it to normal.

Also, I'm not sure how true this is for other people, but for me, most files in torrents have an abhorrent naming convention, and just going into my giant default "Bittorrent Downloads" directory doesn't work well. Most stuff I'm going to rename and move to a more organized directory structure within a few days of download.

Don't get me wrong, I still use Bittorrent more than anything, but for older or less popular files, I often find them on the ED2k network via aMule. Downloads are like molasses, but sometimes that's ok depending on what you're trying to find.

it's been said

[Combatso]

that an infinate number of monkeys, working for an infinate amount of time will eventually recreate the works of shakespere.. does this mean the *IAA will seek to outlaw monkeys, or just the practice of giving monkeys keyboards?

Re:it's been said

[debrain]

that an infinate number of monkeys, working for an infinate amount of time will eventually recreate the works of shakespere

Wouldn't an infinite number of monkeys instantaneously recreate the works of Shakespeare, or one monkey working for an infinite amount of time?

Two infinites does not a greater infinite make.

Re:it's been said

[NotBornYesterday]

To be fair, a Vin Diesel movie can be written by just 2 or 3 monkeys over the course of a week or so.

Evolution of the fittest

[captainpanic]

Shut down a losing concept, and another improved version will take its place.

Spotify Not Available to Me

[eldavojohn]

Why would anyone use that virus-ridden "piece of eight" when you can listen to almost any piece of music you like, legally, on Spotify? (Legal film equivalents are being worked on too).

Because you don't live in the very small section of the world where Spotify is allowed? Also, LimeWire is GPL where as Spotify is proprietary (what are they storing about you?).

But yes, I avoid LimeWire like the plague after several spyware debacles and am kind of curious why, if LimeWire's servers are down, you would use it over Gnutella when the networks it is connecting to are (I assume) all of Gnutella's servers?

Hell, I would assume FrostWire is still a viable and better choice ...

file sharing is the hydra of greek legend

[circletimessquare]

chop off its head, and ten grow back

the only way to destroy filesharing is to destroy the internet. since that's not going to happen, and because you would need more money controlling and monitoring traffic (effectively) than any money you profit off of media, guess what: game over

simple economics 101 have spoken: filesharing is here to stay, and the only thing that will die is distributors who make money off of distributing content. boo hoo

economics is about supply and demand. the internet is disruptive media. it is disruptive, because it changes the basic technology, and therefore the basic economics, of media distribution: one teenager in 2010 has more global reach and distribution power than bertelsmann, time warner, sony, etc., in 1985

so when the cost associated with supply = $0, demand follows to that natural economically determined price point, and no other price is possible. you can't enforce a marketplace form a dead technological era on us

people will still make money off of music, movies, etc.: ancillary real world revenues. like concerts, like cinema houses. avatar is the most profitable movie ever made... all in movie houses. concerts reap millions for artists. but DVDs, CDs... it's all going away. artistry is not dying, only the useless middleman. do not weep for him and do not believe his trollish pronouncements about hurting the artist. sure it will take time, and the death throes will be mighty, but the writing is on the wall. game over

there is nothing for you to do, dear old school media distributors, save one thing: just hurry up and die already

Re:file sharing is the hydra of greek legend

[circletimessquare]

musicians make music because they love music. they do it for that reward alone. any money beyond that fact is just icing on the cake. no one goes into music saying "i have to generate a positive net cash flow in the third quarter." no one writes songs like that, well, no songs you want to listen to anyways. maybe some say "i'm going to write music to impress chicks and get in their pants", but again, that's not money. ego, fame, charisma: that's what makes music. removing money from the equation changes nothing. maybe makes it better

besides, even if you did look at music as only a financial spreadsheet, you are not thinking like a true capitalist. you are thinking like a communist: that we are COERCED to pay for the development of music up front, regardless of quality. a true capitalist says "i think this is a good spot to invest in a restaurant" or "i think we should shovel money into developing this business avenue". risk... and reward. sometimes in capitalism you take risk and there is no reward, you lose money. but there is no such thing as "pay up to support this, you are forced to."

likewise with music: you invest in making a song, and MAYBE someday later you get money for the effort. no guarantee. heck, there was no guarantee before the internet: there were always starving artists, and always will be. you give your songs out for free. if they are liked, you make money touring. THAT'S the new world. and its the same as the old world, before the mid1800s, when corporatism (not capitalism) made music an enforced payment affair

regardless, you are simply putting out the standard middleman distributor troll that filesharing hurts artists. no, it only hurts middleman distributors. fuck them. there will always be music, most of them will be starving artists, as they always have been, and a few will find fame and fortune touring or advertising, same as it always has been. the only thing that changes, is the middleman dies. good riddance

Re:file sharing is the hydra of greek legend

[circletimessquare]

then they are idiots, because the internet as it exists today is the most lucrative money making machine ever in existence, precisely because no one controls it

the illusion that control leads to more prosperity is an old illusion that we all have suffered very mightily from many different times throughout history

You'd think they would have learned

[betterunixthanunix]

This sort of evolutionary jump is precisely what happened when they sued Napster. These people must think that there is some sort of upper bound on technological development, and that if they keep suing, eventually file sharing will die.

Of course, these are the people who tried to block FM radio, so I guess I should not be too surprised.

can an infinite number of monkeys spell "infinite"

[Anonymous Coward]

can an infinite number of monkeys spell "infinite" correctly?

Re:can an infinite number of monkeys spell "infini

[Combatso]

atleast one can

And its been replaced by???

[br00tus]

Limewire is written in Java, meaning it is portable. Limewire can download via a Bittorrent mesh of pieces, and it can also download via a Gnutella mesh of pieces, with Gnutella often able to use Tigertree hashes. So you have the best of both worlds.

I don't see what has come out that surpasses Limewire. Bittorrent is dependent on a web page for searching for files and for finding peers. DHT and Peer Exchange help in this somewhat. Bittorrent is also dependent on web pages in searching for files. Tribler, Cubit and Torrent Exchange are attempts to solve this, but nothing has come out that deals with this, while it has been OK from day one with Gnutella. Gnutella is fundamentally peer-to-peer and extensible. If something better has replaced Limewire I haven't heard of it.