LimeWire Lives Again 278
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 Based on the LimeWire 5.6 beta that was briefly released earlier this year and then withdrawn when Lime Wire LLC lost its lawsuit, LPE is now in the wild.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."
Limewire??? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
You'r right. Limewire is utterly irrelevant as a file sharing service - but it makes a useful case study in the use of litigation to destroy a product. If this pirate edition is well accepted, and traffic on the gnutella network increases, Hopefully the people that sued them will learn that lengthy, costly ligation against software developers is utterly futile if the developers release the code into the wild and the software is back a month later. Hopefully those who develop efficient file sharing paradigms and technologies will realise the best possible protection from litigation is to open-source their software from the beginning (Frostwire never gaught on) to give the best possible guarantee that any legal action will, ultimately, be unsuccessful.
Re:Why (Score:3, Interesting)
In a democracy with perfect information, that may be true. We don't live in one of those.
People with minority tastes usually DO have better information because they take the time to seek it out, and the Internet is a fantastic tool for that purpose.
Everybody else buys what they are told to, more or less. The "music industry" continues to pretend that this market is the only one, because that is the market they understand, and they do what they can through the courts to stop other market mechanisms from working.
Real Soon Now a SoundCloud type service is going to start making money from micropayments to a large enough extent that the mainstream notices, and then it really is bye bye big labels.
Re:file sharing is the hydra of greek legend (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no doubt that right now a lot of very powerful people are trying to work out how to destroy the internet as it exists today, and reform it into something more favorable to making a profit.
Re:file sharing is the hydra of greek legend (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:file sharing is the hydra of greek legend (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:file sharing is the hydra of greek legend (Score:3, Interesting)
The customer couldn't care any less what the supply cost is. They only care about the price--and will only buy if that price is within a range they are willing to pay.
If a musician spends money making music, fine. If they fail to sell because they can't find a buyer, they too have made a BAD investment. Bad investors don't deserve reward or compensation. This market is overly saturated with musicians (or should I say...bad investors,)so if you want to make money you better be the best damn musician out there.