LimeWire Likely To Shut Down Soon 264
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.
Re:Alternative Limewire network coming online... (Score:5, Informative)
Its the gnutella network.
There are already a half-a-dozen alternative clients.
Its like the legal profession is completely naive of how software on the Internet works.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Informative)
And nothing of value was lost. Seriously, who uses an inefficient cruddy program like Limewire when you've got bit torrent?
You don't use a torrent to grab a three or four meg file: swarming protocols work best for sharing large files.
The Gnutella network was, and is, very efficient at sharing small files (you know, the kind that keep media executives up at night.) That said, there are plenty of other ways to share such information, and all the RIAA has done is to (once again) continue the game of whack-a-mole. There are many other Gnutella clients available (personally, I like Phex: multi-platform, open-source, and does what I need. Pick it up on SourceForge) and people will quickly find them. Let the lawyers celebrate their "victory", for whatever it's worth.
FrostWire (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Informative)
For MP3s, it's actually perfectly fine. I've never gotten anything troublesome from LimeWire. Search results are always crowded with garbage, but the spam is so crude that you'd have to be a moron to download it:
Pretend Example Search: kate bush wuthering heights
1. "kate bush wuthering heights.mp3"
Do not download files whose names are identical to your search
2. "Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights.wmv"
Do not download WMVs
3. "Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights.mp3 ~ 3kB"
Sort by size and find something near 1MB-per-minute
4. "Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights.mp3 (rare live recording)"
Strangely, every song ever recorded has a "rare live recording" that you probably shouldn't download.
5. "underage porn sex girl with horse and dog"
Even if you WERE looking for filthy, illegal porn you'd have to be an idiot to download that. But man, there are a lot of files with names like that.
So you search, sort by size, download something with a sane name of the right size, and probably never play it in WMP, just to be safe.
But really? The "index of" Google search has largely replaced LimeWire for me anyway. It's fast, it's easy, you don't spew your hot, sticky IP all over the Gnutella network, you can use it from any smartphone with a web browser...it's gotten extremely polluted with fake spam index-of sites, but there are also sites that helper filter the spam sites.
BitTorrent just seems like a waste of energy for music...but I don't really know why. I suppose it works as well for small files as large... it just feels like more work to search for something so small in the browser, open it in a new app, clutter uTorrent with a thousand tiny downloads...
LimeWire still has a place in my heart.
Re:I switched to legal downloads (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with iTunes and the like is it is impossible to get many artists, other times you can find early or later works by a band but can't find the ones you want, or in extreme cases iTunes wants you to pay $10+ for the album when you really want one song.
Music distributors finally got their heads out of their rears recently and eliminated DRM for the most part, but there is still a lot of things they are doing wrong.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:2, Informative)
Shareaza (Score:2, Informative)
windows only (kinda works on wine)
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:3, Informative)
Most decent clients will let you download only specific files from a torrent.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:1, Informative)
Good luck finding a decent torrent for small files. Yeah, BitTorrent is great for downloading a 700 MB Ubuntu ISO, yeah, its great for getting every song a band sang, ever. But, for downloading a single song or other small files? BitTorrent is pretty terrible.
what do you mean, if a torrent contains a zip file of an entire album, you can download just one song from it.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:3, Informative)
Bittorrent is excellent for downloading individual files.
Most torrent clients allow you to download individual files from a collection via some sort of Properties dialog.
You get the .torrent for the entire album or collection. Then when you load it in your client you go to the Properties/Files dialog and uncheck every song or file except those that you wish to download.
It is good for things like John Mayer albums, where most of the songs on the new album are repeats of songs from the previous album.
A lazy bastard, he is.
They can and they have (Score:5, Informative)
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 [reuters.com]
Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)
Imagine, if you can't download Windows, Photoshop or MS Office anymore.
The problem is buying a machine without Windows or MS Office, not downloading it.
Photoshop Elements ($79) is enough for most people. Really, the typical teenager in his parent's basement has no need for CYMK separation capability. Most printing plants prefer to do that themselves now; they know their own ink and press capabilities.
Re:UMG v. MP3.com (Score:3, Informative)
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).
320,000 Downloads Of The Client Each Week (Score:5, Informative)
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 [cnet.com]
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A blast from the past (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, NOD32 flagged that...
5/16/2010 10:15:20 PM
HTTP filter file
http://cristgaming.com/pirate.swf [cristgaming.com] BAT/ZEP.A virus
connection terminated - quarantined
Threat was detected upon access to web by the application:
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:4, Informative)
60%, really? (Score:3, Informative)
"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?
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:1, Informative)