LimeWire Plots a Return

LimeWire, a hugely popular peer-to-peer file sharing service that shut down more than a decade ago, plans to relaunch as soon as May as a digital collectibles marketplace for music, Slashdot has learned. The firm is currently engaging with artists for exclusive partnerships, we are told.

Pivot

[DarkRookie2]

From one scam into another.

Engaging with artists eh?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Also, presumably, working with the RIAA and making sure it's all legal and paid for.

In other words, in ain't limewire. It's yet another music streaming service.

Trademarks

[Dwedit]

Yay, casual trademark infringement.

Trademark Infringement is intended to stop a company from relying on the reputation and customer goodwill built up towards a brand that is not theirs.

The original creators of LimeWire never got a registered trademark for their program, so anyone can use the name for a different scam with no recourse. Using a popular product's name? Instant media attention too.

Re:

[s4080326]

It's always annoyed me that there was no requirement to maintain a product's quality when using a trademark. Pretty much all IP laws have been so skewed towards corporations that abolishing them entirely is probably preferable to the current situation and that is worrying.

Meh

[AgentUSA]

I’m wondering who thought this was a good idea? Anyone in your potential target audience who would even remember Limewire is now twenty years older.

Re:

[Rayfield k.]

All I remember is opening song_name.mp3.exe was a terrible mistake

They chose a great time to return

[ickleberry]

Back in Limewire's heyday everyone hated spyware/adware. Now most android/apple apps *are* spyware/adware and people are happy to accept them. Spyware has also grown much more advanced as have AI overlord datamining tech to harvest said data.

Napster already did this

[wakeboarder]

They came back as a commercial service (if I remember right), I personally never tried it. (oh wait, just checked and it does still exist!). Did it work for them?, somewhat. Will it work for limewire? somewhat, but it won't be awesome like it was back in the day.

But these services had their place and force the unbending music industry to change their distribution, which is better for all of us to some extent.

Re:

[Voyager529]

They came back as a commercial service (if I remember right), I personally never tried it. (oh wait, just checked and it does still exist!).

I always felt bad for the above-board rebirth of Napster. People were never able to shake the name from Sean Fanning's P2P version; every time I tried telling people about it, I had to get them to disassociate what they knew, keeping in mind that at the time, even those who didn't use the service knew about it because it was front page news for quite a while.

Moreover, they started trying to market themselves at the same time iPods were popular. In a pre-LTE world, music came from either CD rips, iTunes purc

No more peer-to-peer

[enriquevagu]

Subscription video services make video consumption simpler than pirating content, and CG-NAT will eventually put the last nail in the coffin, preventing the remaining users from using P2P. So why not launching an NFT scam while people still remember your name?

Re:

[ickleberry]

CG-NAT will die out soon enough. In Ireland and a lot of Europe most people would have IPv6 at this point

It has been a while...

[Urinal Pube]

Just the other day, I was thinking about how I hadn't infected my computer with AIDS in exchange for music in quite some time.

They should cross license

[rsilvergun]

with Atari and Intelivision (or is it Amico?).

I think it's safe to say this is just somebody who bought the name. Probably for a song (can't do the ascii art sunglasses here, curse you /. filter!) .

Born before 2000?

[kmoser]

Before streaming we used Limewire to download MP3 files and play them on something called Winamp. We would also tie an onion to our belt, which was the style at the time.