October 27, 2010

Federal judge shuts down file-sharing site LimeWire

10-27-2010 New York:

A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York [official website] issued a permanent injunction [text, PDF] Tuesday that will prevent music file-sharing website LimeWire [website] from providing online users with the software necessary to share copyrighted files. The injunction shut down the website, which plaintiff Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) [trade website] claimed has allowed for "millions upon millions of users" to illegally access and distribute copyrighted songs. The district court ruled that RIAA has suffered and continues to suffer irreparable harm to its business and that even a permanent injunction will not give RIAA adequate remedy for its potential future injury as a result of continued peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. The court also decided that LimeWire intentionally encouraged copyright infringement, particularly in light of its knowledge of other recent cases involving illegal file-sharing websites, like Grokster and Aimster [EFF materials]. LimeWire could face a minimum of $150,000 in statutory damages per each copyright violation, placing its total damages over $1 billion [PCWorld report]. The court will rule on damages in January. ..Source.. The Jurist

2 comments:

Chance said...

All Limewire does is allow access through their client to the Gnutella P2P network. What they have done is the equivalent of attempting to stop people from driving by outlawing a single specific model of automobile; there are plenty of other vehicles readily available to obtain and drive.

This really showcases the ineptitude with which lawmakers understand how something actually works and their approach to it.

There is a similar movement by lawmakers against bittorrent sites using the complaint that they allow searching and linking to copyrighted material distributed by torrent, the problem being that Google, and any search engine for that matter, does the same but is not attacked by lawmakers.

Anonymous said...

I do not understand why there isn't a special court for crimes involving the internet. There are too many complex issues and attorneys and judges should have a specific knowledge base in addition to legal knowledge. There is a special court for Bankruptcy why isn't there a movement for an Internet/Technology Court?