P2P suffers sour defeat as court shutters LimeWire

by Steven Mostyn - Oct 27 2010, 09:19

Siding with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a Manhattan district court has granted a permanent injunction against LimeWire, ordering the virtual shuttering of the popular file-sharing service.

According to the order, which was issued by Judge Kimba Wood, LimeWire is to immediately disable the searching, downloading, uploading and file trading of its P2P software. It is also to block any and all music files that are being shared without the authorisation of the copyright holder.

“For the better part of the last decade, LimeWire and [owner Mark] Gorton have violated the law,” commented the RIAA in a statement. “The court has now signed an injunction that will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that LimeWire and Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely.”

By way of response, a LimeWire spokesperson has said the service is not shutting down completely but will be applying its “best efforts” in order to clamp down on the distribution and support of P2P software.

It has also posted a website notice advising users of the court order and stating that the “downloading or sharing of copyrighted content without authorization is illegal.”

According to the RIAA, the case against LimeWire will go to trial in January of 2011, at which point the association will pursue monetary damages to compensate the record companies “for the billions and billions of illegal downloads” that passed through the LimeWire system.

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