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.

Good Riddance

[Haedrian]

I'm pretty sure that the closure of limewire will cause the amount of malware in the wild to drop dramatically.

Re:They're still around?

[MrEricSir]

I'm still using iMesh and WinMX.

Re:FTP

[countSudoku()]

Yes, FTP is next. ;) Not my sneakernet though. Thanks for the reminder, I need to obtain a 1TB drive for more sweet, free, sneakernet content. Really, we only need one person to buy any single piece of media, then we dist. Everyone is invited. RIP, share, enjoy. Never been to limewire.

Re:They can't distribute the client any more?

[athakur999]

Peer discovery is the very essence of the Gnutella protocol used by Gnutella. The Limewire client probably uses Limewire's servers to get an initial list of peers to connect to but beyond that, they shouldn't be needed. There are alternative methods to do this initial peer discovery as well so even if you take away Limewire's servers, things should still work fine, it just may take longer for your client to discover a decent amount of peers.

What about law enforcement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems they love to troll Limewire to nab people for various underage porn possession. Can't imagine them liking having the easiest honey pot in the world being shut down.

Frostwire?

[supersloshy]

Frostwire's still up. http://www.frostwire.com/ [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 The problem isn't file-sharing, obviously, but an outdated business model and a resistance to change.

Re:There are still non-torrent filesharing network

[tehniobium]

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!

Ignorance

[cosm]

Either I am ignorant, or the judge is.

DOWNLOADING OR SHARING COPYRIGHTED CONTENT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION IS ILLEGAL.

Yes, that is correct. But how can they shut down LimeWire through the vicarious actions of its users? It is the user's who are responsible. They share the data. Unless LimeWire themselves is hosting the copyrighted bits, what are they doing wrong? If they provide some helper service for getting nodes connected, perhaps that is the 'gotcha'. But even then, if they are just managing connections, they still are not hosting the data (AFAIK).

Should we shutdown chat clients and protocols because they allow people to disseminate links to copyright infringed data?
Should we shutdown production of all copy machines because they could be used to infringe copyright?
Should we ban hard-drives because they could be used to store copy-righted data?
Should we ban the human-brain because it could retain the contents of a copyrighted document?

Re. Tard. Ed.

Also, does the injunction necessitate YELLING? I know the out-moded channels are scared and all, but that is just icing on the cake.

Re:Ahh Limewire! That takes me back...

[Rockoon]

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.

Re:There are still non-torrent filesharing network

[icebraining]

And the search sites can very well be hidden onion services... just add a Tor client to popular torrent clients and a button to launch the browser configured to use the Tor proxy, and anyone will be able to use it.

Now the real test starts

[DodgeRules]

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.

Re:Easy fix...

[jd]

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.)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:A Victory For The American People.

[Haedrian]

parent.content.getSarcasmLevel();

Re:Easy fix...

[Mr. Slippery]

The fact that it's open source has nothing to do with it.

Actually that does matter. In Bernstein v. United_States the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that source code is Constitutionally protected speech [wikipedia.org].

Re:There are still non-torrent filesharing network

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Easy fix...

[jd]

I'm Anglo-American, raised in Britain but have birth certificates (legally) for both countries. My view on guns is non-trivial, but can be summarized as:

• Nations with few or no guns are probably better off not getting more.
• Some nations have been highly successful in developing an understanding between the legal and criminal organizations. Where this balance works in practice, disturbing the balance with firearms is probably not a good idea.
• No nation has the right to tell another nation what their Constitution should be.
• In order for the above three to be held true, nations that Constitutionally or legally protect the right to own firearms would necessarily carry a moral obligation not to export arms to countries that hold different points of view, even when that would create a technical infringement at the borderline.
• As someone who grew up within the British perspective, I do not have the right to dictate gun policy within America.
• However, I equally hold that nobody has the right to tell me that I should/must carry a gun or be trained in the use of one, regardless of whether I happen to live in the US at the time or not.
• The Second Amendment is ambiguous - probably deliberately so. However, since there is no real possibility of a gentlemen's agreement being reached with criminals, interpretations that restrict gun ownership should be done with extreme care and should be done only under close supervision by criminologists and psychologists.
• Weapons that have absolutely no psychological defensive value and whose physical defensive value is grossly outweighed by the collateral damage likely, and have no meaningful hunting value, have dubious merit. I cannot tell you they should be banned or even restricted, only that a lack of restriction doesn't appear to achieve anything. Of course, not everything "has" to achieve something.

So, to sum up, I'm not "anti-gun for America" (because I think the situation has long-since deteriorated past the point where that's practical), but I AM "anti-gun" in the sense of America has no bloody right to tell other nations that the Second Amendment should apply to them whether they like it or not.

I am ALSO anti-gun with regards to myself, in that I will not handle a gun under any circumstance, I will not take any orders to do so and will not tolerate any viewpoint that says I should believe otherwise. Anyone who holds that I am "Un-American" for refusing to own a gun can take a long walk off a short plank, in my opinion. Preferably off the top of a skyscraper, but I'm not fussy.

I also firmly believe that if the situation in America changed radically, that some sort of truce could be achieved, that gun advocates should at least consider putting something on the table. Nothing for nothing. It may be that those advocates would reject giving up any freedoms, but it should be by choice and not by obstinacy.

And that is really my bottom-line on any of this. Any view held "just because" - regardless of what it is - is stupid, naive and ultimately very destructive. Views should be considered, rational and based on the best information available at the time.

I don't have to agree with a view to agree that it is rationally-held. I don't have to disagree with a view to believe it irrational. If you believe that 1+1=2 because a purple ant told you so in a dream, it's an irrational belief. That it is true is of no consequence.