LimeWire on Thursday agreed to pay $105 million as part of its lawsuit settlement in what may be the last chapter in the company's history. The payout comes a quick week after a trial to determine the amount that should be paid to music label owners such as Sony, Vivendi, and Warner. The former peer-to-peer company said only that it was glad to be rid of the lawsuit.
A new study by NPD Group found that illegal file sharing has dropped dramatically since a lawsuit shut down Limewire last year. The Recording Industry Association of American had sued parent company Lime Wire and its CEO Mark Gorton for copyright infringement, claiming that the peer-to-peer site encouraged pirating. The study found that after October 2010, when the service closed, the percentage of Internet users downloading music via P2P services dropped almost in half.
LimeWire on Tuesday said it had reached a settlement deal with major music publishers that had sued it for alleged piracy in June of last year. The two sides reached a secret deal that would see the lawsuit dismissed without the possibility of its return. The publishers, including those representing EMI, Sony, and Universal, had wanted as much as $150,000 per song and would have made it impossible for LimeWire to pay them back.
Viacom on Friday said it would appeal its loss to YouTube in a Second US Circuit Court of Appeals after attempting to sue the video site for copyright infringement. It argued that the court incorrectly interpreted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by ruling that YouTube had followed safe harbor guidelines by initially dealing with piracy only by responding to takedown requests from Viacom and others. The judge's statement that YouTube "welcomed" piracy, even if it took down violators, was proof the DMCA didn't apply, Viacom said.
LimeWire on Friday explained that its cancellation of music store plans was a full shutdown of the company. The company planned to close its New York office at the start of 2011. It didn't mention any follow-up companies or projects in a statement to AllThingsD.
LimeWire may be ready to abandon all its legal music service plans based on new leaks today. In addition to official notes to users and vendors that it would stop taking payments and close its current service on December 31, it reportedly also cancelled the music service that would have gone up after the removal of its peer-to-peer app. AllThingsD in obtaining the leak noted that the change was relatively sudden, coming even though it had promised previews of the service as recently as October.
LimeWire late Tuesday said that it had secretly installed a 'cut-off' switch in its peer-to-peer client to accompany the court-mandated withdrawal of its app. After a rumor from PCMag, company representative Tiffany Guarnaccia acknowledged to CNET that a summer update had given LimeWire the ability to isolate clients from the Gnutella network, rendering the app useless. It had also changed its update policy to both patch automatically and to refuse to open if a user wasn't running the latest version.
LimeWire today agreed to stop offering its peer-to-peer file sharing client after an unsuccessful attempt to fight a lawsuit win by RIAA labels from last spring. The company said the move was "not our ideal path" but said it would both remove the option to download the client and improve the filtering where it can. It didn't say how or if it could stop users from running copies they already have.
Eight music publishers have sued Limewire for copyright infringement. David Israelite, chief executive of the National Music Publishers’ Association, said his organization decided to pursue its claim after record companies won a similar lawsuit last month. The publishing group is claiming damages of $150,000 per download, the same as the record industry sought.
At a hearing on Monday, US District Judge Kimba Wood gave LimeWire lawyers two weeks to respond to a motion filed on Friday by RIAA that would close down the music service. RIAA, which represents the music industry, won a copyright infringement lawsuit against LimeWire. A request from a Lime Group lawyer for two more weeks was denied. When LimeWire responds, RIAA gets two weeks for a response, but Judge Wood can rule anytime after the response.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has claimed victory against LimeWire after a years-long battle. Earlier this week, a US District Court ruled that the file-sharing site was responsible for causing copyright infringement through its service.
A lawsuit that dates back to 2006 has been settled, with a federal court judge finding file-sharing service LimeWire liable for copyright infringement. The judge ruled in favor of the RIAA and its member labels that LimeWire's parent company engaged in 'unfair competition' and induced copyright infringement.
A lawsuit filed by the owners of the LimeWire file-sharing service has been thrown out of a New York court, writes the Associated Press. The Lime Group had earlier entered a case against a group of major record labels, charging that they were harming Lime through unfair business practices. Specifically, said Lime's lawyers, the labels were refusing to license out music, which Lime had hoped to implement into an above-board pay service. Instead the labels would only deal with Lime if it used an approved filtering system, or if it struck an agreement with the industry-sanctioned iMesh service.
