LimeWire, once the world’s most popular P2P client, is now officially shut down, following a four-year legal battle against the record industry.
A New York federal court has issued a permanent injunction against the site this week, 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.
Visitors to the site are greeted by the pictured “legal notice.”
While the company can no longer make unauthorized music readily available, the site says it is now “working with the music industry to move forward.”
The court also added that LimeWire should use all available resources to remove all copyrighted materials currently available to downloaders of the client.
Result for: music industry
Techcrunch has a very interesting article today that speaks about “new DRM,” the embedding of personal info into tracks purchased from major retailers such Apple and Wal-Mart.
Here is their post from an anonymous music industry ‘insider’:
Hidden in purchased music files from popular stores such as Apple and Walmart is information to identify the buyer and/or the transaction. You won’t find it disclosed in their published terms of use. It’s nowhere in their support documentation. There’s no mention in the digital receipt. Consumers are largely oblivious to this, but it could have future ramifications as the music industry takes another stab at locking down music files.
Here’s how it works. During the buying process a username and transaction ID are known by the online retailers. Before making the song available for download their software embeds into the file either an account name or a transaction number or both. Once downloaded, the file has squirreled away this personal information in a manner where you can’t easily see it, but if someone knows where to look they can. This information doesn’t affect the audio fidelity, but it does permanently attach to the file data which can be used to trace back to the original purchaser which could be used at a later date.
Retailers aren’t talking, but there’s ample proof of what’s transpiring. Using simple file comparison tools it’s possible to verify this behavior by purchasing identical songs using different accounts and see if they match. I emailed support departments for several retailers asking if they would acknowledge these actions and inquiring about what specific information they are embedding. Only 7digital responded saying they don’t use any watermarks. What retailers won’t say publicly is that the major record labels are requiring this behavior as a precondition to sell their music.
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Result for: music industry
Rock star Bono, of the group U2 made some interesting quotes today, in regards to illegal file sharing and the music and movie industries.
“The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files,” says Bono, adding that in just a few years, bandwidth will be so abundant, and connections so fast that entire movies can be downloaded in under a minute, regardless of size.
“A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us,” he added.
Bono does believe that Internet content can be tracked, and cited the US’ effort to stop child pornography as well as China’s to suppress online gaming and pornography.
“Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly four percent of gross domestic product,” Bono concluded.
