Kazaa / LimeWire / Bearshare

~ here lie the p2p apps ~

After Napster's death in 2001, a fragmented scene of peer-to-peer file-sharing applications stepped in to replace it, while the major ones were Kazaa (launched 2001, Sharman Networks), LimeWire (2000, Lime Wire LLC), Bearshare (2000), Morpheus (2001), and several smaller cousins. Most of these used either the FastTrack protocol (Kazaa, Morpheus) or the Gnutella protocol (LimeWire, Bearshare). The technology was a step forward from Napster: fully decentralised, no central index to shut down.

The legal endgame still came. Kazaa lost a major Australian copyright case in 2005. LimeWire was permanently enjoined from operating by a US federal court in 2010 and ordered to pay $105 million in damages; bearshare was sold and rebranded multiple times. Morpheus shut down in 2008. By 2011, the era of consumer-grade desktop P2P file sharing was effectively over, replaced first by BitTorrent (more technical, less consumer-friendly) and then by streaming services (legal, paid, plenty of).

~ the experience ~

Using Kazaa or LimeWire in 2003 was a particular sensory experience that has no modern equivalent. The general flow:

You decided you wanted to download a song. You typed the song name into the search box. You waited. Results began to populate, slowly. Some were the song you wanted. Some were the song with deliberately misleading metadata (a Britney Spears file that was, when you played it, a man saying "you've been pranked"). Some were viruses. Some were 30-second clips renamed to look like the full song, while some were named correctly but the audio was someone reciting the lyrics in a Russian accent.

You picked a result. You started the download, because the download went at a few KB per second. The download might pause, resume, fail completely, or arrive corrupt. If you were lucky and patient, you got the song. If you were unlucky, you got a piece of malware that installed three browser toolbars and a "registry optimiser" tool you couldn't remove.

The success rate, on a typical evening, was about 60%. The other 40% was a tax for living in the post-Napster era.

~ the spyware era ~

Kazaa, LimeWire (initially), and Bearshare were all funded by bundling spyware. The free installers came with browser toolbars, "search assistants," "shopping helpers," and "system optimisers" that were, in technical reality, ad-injecting browser hijackers. Many users' computers in the 2003-2005 era were running 4-12 unwanted spyware applications, all installed by a P2P client.

Kazaa Lite was a community-modified version of Kazaa with the spyware stripped out. It was widely distributed, semi-legally, and functioned as a folk technology, the real Kazaa is unsafe, but if you can find Kazaa Lite, you can use the network without the parasites. Sharman Networks (Kazaa's owner) sued the maintainers of Kazaa Lite repeatedly. Eventually they won. By 2006 Kazaa Lite was offline.

LimeWire eventually (2004) released a paid Pro version that was spyware-free. The free LimeWire Basic continued to bundle adware until the 2010 shutdown.

~ the end ~

The legal end was inevitable, because the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. found that companies that distribute software with the "object of promoting its use to infringe copyright" can be held liable for resulting infringement. The doctrine of "inducement" set out in Grokster was the legal weapon used to shut down LimeWire and Bearshare.

But the cultural end was driven by streaming. By 2010 Spotify was launching in the US (it had been live in Europe since 2008). iTunes was selling individual songs for 99 cents. Pandora was streaming free, which is why the convenience-versus-piracy ratio shifted. Pirating a song now took as much effort as legally streaming it. The rational consumer choice became, for the first time since 1999, to pay.

By 2013 the percentage of music bought via P2P had dropped to single digits. By 2018 it was statistically irrelevant. The era was over, and p2P file sharing technology persists (BitTorrent, Direct Connect) but as a niche.

~ the void ~

The discovery by accident. P2P search results were unfiltered chaos. You searched for a Pixies song and got a Pixies song with the wrong title, a different band's song, a remix you'd never heard of, and a 1990 cover by a Polish band. The discovery was algorithmic in the most primitive way: noisy, lossy, weirdly generative. Streaming algorithms now show you what they predict you'll like. P2P showed you what other people had hoarded.

The bittersweet ownership. A track downloaded from Kazaa was yours forever. It sat on your hard drive. It survived your switch from XP to Vista to Windows 7. Streaming subscriptions are rented. Many of us still have entire mp3 libraries from the 2003-2007 era and consider them more emotionally durable than our current Spotify Liked Songs.

The malware tax. We do not, on net, miss the malware. But the experience of "I will pay for this download with whatever happens to my computer" was a real economic transaction with real consequences. It taught a generation about file hygiene. The current generation, served clean apps from app stores, never has to learn the same lesson.

~ from the comments below ~

"my parents' computer in 2003 had so many toolbars from kazaa lite installations that the visible browser area was a 200-pixel sliver in the middle of the screen. the rest was toolbar.". e.s. 38

"the limewire shutdown notice in 2010 was the first time i had ever read a federal court order. it was, my civic education.". a.ö. 39