Earlier this week we reported that just two weeks after LimeWire was permanently shut down by a federal ruling, a “secret dev team” had brought the P2P client back, dubbing it the LimeWire Pirate Edition (LPE).
The LPE has the Ask.com toolbar removed, all need for the LimeWire LLC servers removed, all remote settings disabled, and all LimeWire Pro features activated, for free. There is also no adware or spyware.
LPE has been circulating via warez, P2P and torrents sites for a couple of days now.
Apparently, the real LimeWire is not a fan.
“We have very recently become aware of unauthorized applications on the Internet purporting to use the LimeWire name,” reads a notice on the LimeWire site.
“We demand that all persons using the LimeWire software, name, or trademark in order to upload or download copyrighted works in any manner cease and desist from doing so. We further remind you that the unauthorized uploading and downloading of copyrighted works is illegal.”
Result for: p2p client
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: p2p client
P2P video
service Joost has decided to shift away from P2P and head towards Flash. The company will give up their efforts developing the P2P client that has so far defined Joost.
Joost, which was considered one of the most innovative start-ups in early 2007 when the beta was released, has gone through some hard times lately. Ultimately the P2P client, with its obvious benefits, had more flaws than expected. Without the ability to link to specific videos or embed them on to your own website it became obsolete.
In last September Joost launched the Flash site, which gave users the option to select between Flash and P2P. Now there’s no choice to be made. The only platform that will apparently have an own Joost client is iPhone.
Moving to Flash not only means fierce competions with tons of other online video sites, but a much larger bandwidth bill for Joost. P2P streaming was a clever idea, unfortunately it didn’t succeed - at least not in this case.
With no major proprietary content, unlike Hulu with NBC/FOX and TV.com with CBS, Joost will have even harder times ahead. And you don’t need to be an industry analyst to predict that if they don’t come up with something exclusive the story of Joost could be over.
