In a somewhat disturbing victory for the RIAA, a federal court has found Limewire responsible for copyright infringement on their network. This could be bad business for file-sharing as we know it.
The Lime Group, parent company of Lime Wire, lost the suit against the music industry, who was granted summary judgement by U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood. They were also found to have engaged in unfair competition, and induced copyright infringement.
“The evidence demonstrates that [Lime Wire] optimized LimeWire’s features to ensure that users can download digital recordings, the majority of which are protected by copyright,” Wood said in her 59-page decision. “And that [Lime Wire] assisted users in committing infringement.”
There may be details that have not come out at this time, but Limewire is still a piece of software at it’s core. It’s unclear exactly how educated Woods may be on the technology, but this is a very broad brush to paint with. The wording here seems akin to charging a gun maker with a murder committed by one of it’s customers. You may as well also charge Google for assisting in locating torrents and CNET for allowing Limewire to be downloaded in the first place.
Limewire is an insanely popular file-sharing service, having been downloaded over 200 million times according to CNET’s Download.com. 58 percent of people who say they downloaded music from a file-sharing service did so using LImewire. They are the primary choice for the average person as the software covers all the bases without being too technical.
The most dangerous part of this decision is that the court holds founder Mark Gorton personally responsible for the copyright violations. This could scare away other companies and individuals from innovating in the file-sharing or music space at all. The RIAA says they are entitled to the maximum judgement, which would be $150,000 for each registered work downloaded. Assuming only 1000 songs were ever downloaded from Limewire, which is a ridiculously small estimate, that’s already $150 million owed.
We can only hope that this is not the end of the story. While protecting copyrighted works is of utmost importance, going after software that could be used to violate copyrights is not the solution. Limewire looks forward to a status conference with Judge Wood on June 1st regarding the judgement.