A daily digest of IT news, curated from blogs, forums and news sites around the web each morning. We highlight the key commentary and demystify the real story.
Ahoy, shipmates! There'll be no more of this LimeWire free download shenanigans aboard this fine vessel. Yes, P2P 'pirates' are singing a sad sea shanty: it seems that the LimeWire file-sharing service has finally been silenced by the RIAA and the usual chorus of record companies. The long-running legal opus reached a crescendo in a New York court, as the judge told the Lime Company to knock it off, presto. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers join in and clap their hands.
In a 17-page injunction ... Judge Kimba Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered LimeWire to cease ... searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and file distribution.
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The court injunction is a huge victory for the ... RIAA, which has been trying to get the court to shut down LimeWire for quite some time. ... The music industry has claimed that the use of LimeWire ... has caused the industry tens of millions of dollars in losses.
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LimeWire almost certainly will be held liable for the piracy and potentially be assessed statutory damages that are well beyond its capacity to pay.
Rik Myslewski uses a theatrical metaphor:
Tuesday's news brings down the curtain on LimeWire's arm-wrestling match with Arista, Atlantic, Capitol, Elektra, Interscope, Motown, Sony, Warner, and others.
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Except to paraphase a famous Python sketch it's not dead yet. "We are excited about the future," ... Lime Company CEO George Searle ... contends in his statement. "The injunction applies only to the LimeWire product. Our company remains open for business." ... Might there be a US-based Spotify clone in the works?
Martin Brinkmann suggests an alternative:
It operates on the Gnutella network which has not been affected by the ruling. ... LimeWire users who are looking for an alternative may want to take a look at the Open Source client FrostWire.
The pseudonymous Ernesto van der Sar looks ahead:
The verdict is expected to have an unprecedented impact on the P2P file-sharing landscape. ... Software thats similar to LimeWire might be affected negatively. ... In the injunction software such as FrostWire and MP3Rocket, but also BitTorrent clients including uTorrent ... are described as similar software. Could one of these become the next target?
Louis Gray takes a wider view:
Most people will take legal approaches to purchase goods or services if they are ... readily available ... at acceptable market rates. ... Only when market conditions are so out of whack with public perception ... do you see a dramatic uprising of illegal activity - as the public essentially revolts against the inflexible market makers.
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It's not as if the company didn't know exactly what it was getting into when it launched and supported its service. It wasn't ... naive enough to think its users were sharing PG-rated photos and freeware software. ... Illegal things are illegal. They always have been. Just because software and technology makes it possible doesn't change the rules.
Erick Schonfeld despairs for the music industry's business model:
The music industry lawyers just put another notch on their wall.
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As far as the Internet goes, the music industry is basically organized around litigation on one side, and extracting maximum licensing fees from music startups that try to play by the rules on the other. ... The lawyers won, but their ships are still sinking.
Richi Jenningsis an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, you can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itbw@richij.com.
