Limewire Servers Shut Down

After a 4 year legal battle with the Federal Court of New York, the Peer-to-Peer file sharing site Limewire has had its servers shut down for the last time.

This is latest client to fall in recent years after Napster, Kazaa and Morpheus in the legal battle against illegal music downloads and infringement of copyright laws. The Limewire software though is still widely used and is believed to be the largest client of its type to use the Gnutella network for P2P activity. The use of the client will quickly fall however as the shut down of teh relay servers means that the client will be unable to search the network for others that are sharing a particular file.

Anybody that now goes to the Limewire official site, which was founded in 2000 by a former Wall Street trader Mark Gordon, will now be faced with a legal notice informing them that the site is under a court injunction for illegal activity

LEGAL NOTICE
THIS IS AN OFFICIAL NOTICE THAT LIMEWIRE IS UNDER A COURT-ORDERED INJUNCTION TO STOP DISTRIBUTING AND SUPPORTING ITS FILE-SHARING SOFTWARE. DOWNLOADING OR SHARING COPYRIGHTED CONTENT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION IS ILLEGAL.

Following the placement of the injunction the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) said: “For the better part of the last decade, Limewire and Gorton have violated the law”

“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.

“In January, the court will conduct a trial to determine the appropriate level of damages necessary to compensate the record companies for the billions and billions of illegal downloads that occurred through the LimeWire system.”

The LimeGroup who owns the site and client rights appeared to acknowledge their defeat in the courts.

“We are out of the file-sharing business, but you can make it known that other aspects of our business remain ongoing,” said LimeGroup spokeswoman Tiffany Guarnaccia.