RIAA sues Limewire

Filed under: P2P

RIAA sues Limewire

by Grant Robertson Aug 4th 2006

Lime Group LLC, the company behind peer to peer application LimeWire, sued today in federal court by the RIAA for damages including $150,000 per occurance of copyright infringing files. The complaint seeks damages on the grounds that LimeWire, and thus Lime Group LLC, facillitated the trade of copywritten music between users and profited as a result of LimeWire's failure to "block" copyright protected material.

Lime Group LLC has so far refused comment.

Lime Group was threatened last September, along with a host of other P2P application developers, with legal action if the company failed to comply with RIAA demands to either shut down, successfully filter all copyright protected material or drop the open peer to peer topology for a licensed content model approved by the RIAA.

KaZaa recently settled a similar case for $115 million, others such as WinMX and Bearshare have shut down. Qtrax, another less known but veteran name in peer to peer is preparing to offer a licensed peer to peer model that would comply with the RIAA's demands.

[Via Digg]

Tags: bearshare, eMule, gnutella, law, lawsuit, Limewire, p2p, peer to peer, PeerToPeer, piracy, RIAA

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Matthew J Wilson said 11:28AM on 8-05-2006

"...including $150,000 per occurance of copyright infringing files."
How exactly would they track how many occurances. I can't help but think this is just RIAA throwing a temper tantrum.

It also reminds me of the concept of a suing the gun manufacturer for one of it's guns killing someone in a bank robery.

Tony F. said 5:28PM on 8-05-2006

Wow number 1, that is one of the most perfect examples i have ever heard. This was bound to happen, there gonna turn into another napster, was a good ride thou.... i hope they dont get ahold of frostwire thou....i hope the RIAA goes to he**

TheMovieGoer.com said 2:00PM on 8-08-2006

hehe, winmx aint shut down

Susheel Daswani said 2:03PM on 8-08-2006

Check out a section by section analysis of the LimeWire complaint at http://techimpact.blogspot.com/ .

Dixi said 7:45AM on 2-05-2008

If they close LimeWire they can't close other open source projects based on LimeWire open technologies. You can shutdown only certain company not public and opened technology.

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