LimeWire doing well
p2pnet.net news:- The marketing policy of Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the members of the Big 4 Organised Music cartel, is simple and direct and can be summed up in four words:
Put the boot in. If anyone, and that includes little girls, doesn’t toe the corporate line, stomp them into shape.
The Big 4’s unswerving devotion to this approach is seriously alienating their already dwindling consumer bases and has made them pariahs in the eyes of 99.99999% of online music lovers.
Last year, LimeWire said an RIAA lawsuit against it was was no more than a component in an overall scheme to, “to destroy any online music distribution service they did not own or control, or force such services to do business with them on exclusive and/or other anticompetitive terms so as to limit and ultimately control the distribution and pricing of digital music, all to the detriment of consumers”.
The RIAA has, “hammered a string of file-sharing companies over the past eighteen months, and in each case, the group has extracted million-dollar settlements and a number of favorable concessions,” says Digital Music News. “The list of the conquered includes Bearshare, Kazaa, Grokster, and eDonkey, once-proud destinations that are now shadows of their former selves. The tirade has been incredibly effective, and backed by a favorable Supreme Court ruling in MGM v. Grokster.”
Notwithstanding, “According to February application installation figures recently published by the Digital Music News Research Group, a whopping 18.3 percent of computer desktops worldwide contain the application, a number that easily eclipses its nearest rivals.”
RIAA is short for Recording Industry Association of America and ironically, it’s principally controlled by three foreign companies, EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany). And the single American component, Warner Music, is run by a Canadian.
In September last year, p2pnet posted:
LimeWire is demanding a trial by jury in a landmark case involving what used to be a small group of independent companies who made and marketed p2p file sharing applications.
FreePeers (BearShare), Manolito P2P (Blubster), MetaMachine (eDonkey) and Streamcast Networks (Morpheus) founded, and were part of, P2P United, a trade and lobbying organization which now exists only as a wiki post.
LimeWire steered its own course but was ultimately beaten down by RIAA Cease & Desist letters sent off soon after the infamous US Supreme Court Grokster v MGM ruling.
One after another, LimeWire, BearShare, iMesh, eDonkey, Grokster, Sharman Networks’ Kazaa – which had always wanted to be part of the corporate crowd – and others, large and small, such as iMex, i2Hub and WinMX, went down, some of them to re-appear under what amounts to corporate ownership.
On what used to be its web site, “If you steal music or movies, you are breaking the law. Courts around the world – including the United States Supreme Court – have ruled that businesses and individuals can be prosecuted for illegal downloading,” says eDonkey.
Still standing are only Morpheus, Warez P2P and Blubster.
The name of the game is: crush competition, actual or potential.
All of it.
Said Digital Music News:
In a discussion … the RIAA pointed Digital Music News to a protracted legal process, one that the group only has a certain level of control over. “They respond. We respond. They respond, etc. Then discovery. These things take a long time,” said RIAA representative Jonathan Lamy during the Tuesday discussion. That certainly sounds familiar to barristers everywhere, though more information suggests that the RIAA could be facing a more difficult legal challenge than most think. According to one insider, Lime Group chief executive Mark Gorton has been preparing for a fight for years, and a more secure defense could emerge. One source close to the organization also noted that there were “no internal emails” and “no paper trail” indicating that the group knowingly encouraged copyright infringement, a critical component of the inducement test for the courts. Meanwhile, earlier efforts by Limewire to structure an amicable, licensed P2P system with major labels now appear dead, thanks to relative disinterest on both sides of the table.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
little girls – RIAA targets 10-year-old girl, March 25, 2007
Digital Music News – Limewire Legal Battle Could Get Ugly, Sources, March 22, 2007
p2pnet – LimeWire versus the RIAA, September 26, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
