People may have a harder time downloading their crappy new wave electro-pop as sung by androgynous female singers now that LimeWire, the popular P2P platform, has lost the case against US record labels for copyright infringement. This marks another victory won by record labels against online file-sharing.
On Tuesday, in a major court case, the federal court ruled against LimeWire finding the owners of the peer-to-peer program personally liable to copyright infringement.
The case was brought forth by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing four major US labels, in August of 2006. It has almost been four years, and the P2P program is still the most popular software for exchanging files. But like Napster before it, the program quickly gained attention and heat from the record companies.
The fact that the judge has found the creators personally responsible for the infringements by way of creating the software with the capability to share copyrighted materials, will be particularly unnerving to other social media. Facebook’s owners better make sure people don’t start uploading illegal MP3s or they may be next.
The court has not yet determined the issue of monetary damages, though the RIAA has claimed they are owed up to $150,000 for every copyrighted work. Millions of files will be in question from these four labels, but this case has opened the door for even more labels to make injunctions.
So if this is the end of LimeWire, at least Metallica wasn’t around this time to kill it off.
Source: The Guardian