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LimeWire to close
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 6 December 2010
So, this is the end of an era. The LimeWire company has announced it is shutting it doors for the final time at the end of the month. Plans to launch a legal music service have been axed and the LimeWire download store, which sold tracks from a handful of indie labels, will be going offline.
Team Lime have accepted defeat after a US judge ordered them to stop distributing their file-sharing software back in October, having previously ruled the Lime Group was guilty of massive copyright infringement by making the P2P client available. The Lime company complied with the ruling, partly because it was still busy trying to persuade the music industry to play ball on a new legal LimeWire platform. But presumably the company has now accepted that the four major labels, at least, would rather see it fall out of business than collaborate on a new music service, however profitable that service could become. The US record industry is now expected to file a damages claim for billions against LimeWire and its founder Mark Gorton.
In a statement, Team Lime said: “Given our current situation, plans to bring our separate, legal music service to market have been cancelled. The beginning of 2011 will mark the closing of LimeWire’s New York office and cessation of business by LimeWire. We attracted some of the top talent from the technology community over the years to build our new music service. We’ll be helping our team members commence their job search over the next few months”.
After years of legal action against LimeWire by the record industry, the once bullish king of the P2P file-sharing domain has shuffled away from the piracy battle ground rather quietly. It’s a big win for the US music business though, of course, in tangible terms it will do little to curb actual file-sharing, with most file-sharers having long since moved their allegiances to other file-sharing technologies which offer faster downloads and, in many cases, considerable anonymity.
