Injunction Issued to Stop LimeWire P2P Services

Regular users of LimeWire from around the globe would surely not miss the legal notice that pops up when they access the website.  It is posted there that the site is “under a court-ordered injunction to stop distributing and supporting file-sharing software…”.  The ban, issued by a federal judge from a New York district court, halted the use of its “searching, downloading, uploading and file trading features”.  The ruling is a triumph for the Recording Industry Association of America or RIAA which filed the “copyright infringement” case four years ago.

This latest verdict over LimeWire is definitely bad news to the more than 50 million users of its peer-to-peer file-sharing (P2P) services which allows free access to music and movies over the net while contents from the enhanced versions are sold for minimal fees.  A 2009 survey done on internet usage for downloading music showed that more than half of P2P users are hooked on this site which had been around for ten years.

RIAA is the group that looks after the intellectual property of the artists as well as the music labels it represents which includes the EMI Group, Sony Music, Warner Music and the Universal Music Group. RIAA claims that the use of the copyrighted content that the site downloads and shares to its users is not authorized and therefore illegal.  It asserts that the legitimate record companies under its care lost millions of earning from online piracy of their works while LimeWire enriched itself greatly.

However, P2P users may not need to mourn long since only the distribution and sharing of P2P software had ceased.  In fact, new software offering new services that would comply with copyright laws is already under the pipeline even before the injunction was made.  The ruling further binds Limewire to seek the consent of music companies before creating and launching a lawful version of its file-sharing feature.

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