LimeWire, once the world’s most popular P2P client, was officially shut down last month, following a four-year legal battle against the record industry.
A New York federal court issued a permanent injunction against the site, ruling that LimeWire caused a “massive scale of infringement” by intentionally giving users a platform to share millions of unauthorized music tracks.
At its peak, LimeWire was seeing 50 million monthly users.
Today, the company has sent out a memo scrapping their longstanding plans to open a new legal music download store, meaning there is literally nothing left of the company.
The current LimeWire store will also shut on December 31st, and the company will not accept any new payments, effective immediately.
Result for: legal music
Over the past few months, the Chinese Ministry of Culture has identified 185 sites that infringe on copyrights, adding that the sites violate regulations and do not have licenses to distribute music.
Since April, 23 of those sites have shut down, and the Ministry is still actively investigating the others.
The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) has applauded the recent actions:
“It is good news that the authorities are taking action against some infringing websites, but there are many more illegal music services that continue to operate with impunity,” says Leong Mayseey, IFPI regional director for Asia, (via Billboard).
“Only 23 of the original 185 websites identified by the Ministry of Culture have been taken down and it is not clear what penalties, if any, their operators face. If China wants its creative sector to punch its weight globally, it must do more to create a widespread climate of respect for intellectual property.”
Continuing, the director says: “We hope to see the authorities following this welcome development with further action against services that illegally build their businesses by abusing other people’s rights.”
Result for: legal music
Despite a recently publicized 18 percent jump in legal music sales following the launch of Ipred in Sweden, the Local is reporting that illegal file sharing is back in full force, reaching new record levels.
Stats from Swedish organization Netnod showed that Internet traffic in the entire country dropped 40 percent when Ipred went into effect in April, mainly due to a cutback in BitTorrent traffic.
TheLocal is reporting that Internet traffic is at all-time high now in the nation, although the numbers can hardly be considered set in stone at the moment.
“Spotify and the various television channels ‘Play’ sites haven’t yet released their statistics. There is guaranteed to be certain increase in file sharing, but it isn’t possible to tell exactly how much,” added researcher Kristoffer Schollin.
Anti-virus protection company McAfee also says that file-sharing sites have grown by over 300 percent since Ipred.
“Then you have the illegal video streaming sites, which aren’t file sharing in the traditional sense, but which play the same role for users. Watching a movie via a streaming video directly in your web browser is becoming more and more popular,” Schollin adds.
