LimeWire

» see limewire.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

limewire was the windows-xp file-sharing client. it was a java app with a green icon and a search box, and it spoke to the gnutella network instead of going through a central index. that was the whole pitch after napster lost in court: take out the central server and there is nobody left to sue. a us judge eventually decided you could still sue the people who wrote the client.

i did not stay on limewire long. tr file-sharing in the early 2000s was kazaa territory. once that got stuffed with riaa-poisoned tracks, the move was to emule or dc++. limewire was the version anglo internet users tended to default to, and it has a reputation for being the slowest path to a corrupted mp3 you ever heard of. when broadband landed at home through ttnet around 2006, the fast option was already public bittorrent trackers. limewire kept running in the background of computer-illiterate friends' laptops, the way realplayer did.

by 2010 it was the last name-brand p2p client still being installed by people who did not know what bittorrent was. that was both why the riaa was still suing it and why ten million people still had it open.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

mark gorton built limewire as a side project of a quant-trading firm in manhattan. it shipped in may 2000, four months before napster lost its first preliminary injunction. the timing was almost perfect. limewire ran on the gnutella protocol, which had been published as open source by nullsoft a few months earlier, then disowned by aol when aol noticed what nullsoft had done.

the gnutella design meant every client searched the network directly instead of asking a server. that made it harder to take down at the network level, but it also made the network slower and noisier than napster had been. the trade was that limewire kept working when napster did not.

~ what really happened ~

the riaa filed in 2006. arista records v. lime group dragged through four years of summary judgment fights. judge kimba wood found in 2010 that limewire induced copyright infringement, and the october injunction ordered the company to disable downloading and file distribution. the kill-switch built into version 5.5.11 made that order enforceable on every machine still online.

the settlement landed in may 2011 at roughly $105 million, against a riaa initial damages calculation that hit $72 trillion at one stage of the case. the trillion-dollar figure is the part everyone remembers, because it was a larger number than the entire recorded music industry had ever earned.

~ what it became ~

the limewire trademark sat unused for years. in 2022 a separate group of investors bought the name and relaunched it as an nft marketplace, which had nothing to do with file-sharing and quietly faded with the rest of the nft cycle. the green icon still shows up in millennial-internet retrospectives as shorthand for "the moment your dad downloaded a virus pretending to be limp bizkit."

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