LimeWire versus the RIAA
2pnet.net News:- 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.
But it seems LimeWire hasn’t capitulated entirely, alleging in a court document that the RIAA lawsuit is 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 sued LimeWire, parent company Lime Group, ceo Mark Gorton (left) and coo Greg Bildson for $150,000 damages for each song downloaded using LimeWire. Now it says the RIAA suit was lodged as, “but one part of a much larger modern conspiracy to destroy all innovation that content owners cannot control and that disrupts their historical business models”.
The music industry has refused to do business with it because it wants to force the adoption of a track-and-charge system based on acoustic fingerprinting technology, says LimeWire.
The Big Four’s RIAA, “has tried to strong-arm common citizens as well as creators of file-sharing programs with as little as only a few IP addresses, but in several cases, could not show what songs were downloaded by which person, and then demanded defendants turn over hard drives for the RIAA to ‘find the evidence’ it was supposed to have had to begin with,” says CD Freaks, going on:
Interestingly, the summarized version of the counterclaims appear to further support what critics of the current music ‘distribution’ have stated at different times: artificially limited supplies of CDs by major labels and clearly inflating pricing on things like CDs or digital songs that do not accurately reflect costs plus a reasonable profit.
What this boils down to is the fact the RIAA wants to reestablish the former monopoly over music distribution the industry once enjoyed. Furthermore, while the RIAA continues propagating the unsubstantiated myth that file sharing ‘costs the industry billions,’ it conveniently ignores the fact that when people can hear songs and see the album is a quality effort, they buy it, so filesharing has significantly increased music sales.
A further reading [of the court document] proposes the real solution: in a free-market system that encourages competition, for any entity to survive and grow, it must find legitimate ways to compete through better services, innovation, etc. But the RIAA and music industry to this point have not been forced to do this, since the advent of the Internet and the ease of accessing and using MP3 files.
And, “Like most US based P2P clients or network providers, LimeWire was given a choice by the entertainment industry, settle or face annihilation,” says Slyck, continuing:
LimeWire has avoided a similar fate for various reasons. Perhaps most importantly, its open source nature has prevented this client from crumbling to dust. By drawing on the open source movement, LimeWire has ensured its survival by sharing its source code with whoever wishes to examine it. The open source community has contributed greatly to this project; with valuable assets such as programmers, conceptual innovators, and of course, input from the community.
These assets have been instrumental in the survival of file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent, Ares Galaxy, Gnutella, and eDonkey2000.
While open source is helpful for a P2P network’s survival, it doesn’t guarantee the survival of a commercial P2P developer – unless you under the LimeGroup umbrella.
LimeGroup is an umbrella company which runs several businesses. These businesses include Tower Research Capital, Lime Brokerage, LimeWire, and Lime Capital Management. Lime Group is a wealthy company with offices in New York and Boston, and appears fearless at the prospect of taking on the music industry.
LimeWire’s Mark Gorton and Greg Bildson filed a counter claim today, alleging the music industry “…incurred antitrust violations, consumer fraud, and other misconduct.” The RIAA sued LimeWire in early August for not complying with its September 13, 2005, cease and desist notification.
“[The RIAA’s] goal was simple: 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.”
Most of LimeWire’s counterclaim denied or did not claim knowledge of a vast majority of the music industry’s allegations. LimeWire’s complaint stated it was extremely difficult to negotiate with the music industry, which LimeWire felt took an uncooperative position. If LimeWire wanted to comply, it would have to conform to a standard similar to iMesh – which in LimeWire’s opinion is and was uncompetitive. Indeed, LimeWire’s counterclaim becomes hostile against iMesh, claiming it has an unusually close working relationship with the RIAA.
“While from all outward appearances iMesh is not controlled by the RIAA and Counter-Defendants, dealings with iMesh by LimeWre and other P2P companies demonstrate, in reality, that this is not the case [paragraph 40]…
“…iMesh’s and the RIAA’s goal is to have these P2P companies concede, under the thread of expensive litigation, to sell their assets for essentially nothing, with the promise of a “get out of jail free card” from the RIAA. In turn, the P2P company must simply turn-over its userbase (which is the single largest asset typically) to imesh so they can then force a conversion to the iMesh platform which, in turn,will lead to huge profits to iMesh and, of course, the Major Labels.”
With LimeWire’s 4 million plus userbase, even a small conversion of users would equal a substantial reward. Although few doubt the seriousness of the upcoming legal proceedings, and by the tone of the complaint (which demands a trial by jury), LimeWire still managed to squeeze in a tad of humor.
From paragraph 41 of the RIAA’s complaint:
“Once installed, LimeWire is easy for the user to launch and run. Indeed, to increase the number of users who are actually running LimeWire at any given time — and thereby increase the number of Plaintiffs’ sound recordings on the network that are available for users to download — Defendants have designed LimeWire to automatically launch upon startup of the user’s computer (unless the user specifically designates otherwise).”
To which LimeWire responds:
“Defendants admit the allegations of the first sentence of paragraph 41 of the Complaint. Defendants deny the remaining allegations of paragraph 41 of the Complaint but admit that the LimeWire software application can automatically launch upon start up of a user’s computer for Windows versions only, unless the user designates otherwise.”
Meanwhile, FrostWire, a fork of the LimeWire Gnutella client whose declared purpose is, “to keep and maintain the freedoms that LimeWire LLC may be forced to withdraw,” lives on.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
corporate crowd - Sharman woos Hollywood, June 19, 2004
eDonkey - eDonkey goes down, September 12, 2006
CD Freaks - Lime Wire sues RIAA for antitrust violations, September 26, 2006
Slyck - LimeWire Counter Sues the RIAA, September 25, 2006
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September 26th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
Anyone not in a coma for the past decade would know that this routine doesn’t work anymore. Apart from being as predictiable as ‘who’se on first?’ the defensive strategy here has been struck out so many times that if it were a boxer the only sponsorship would be on the bottom of their shoes.
Taking this approach is revealing insofar as it is a pretty good indicator of how far behind Limewire’s thinking actually is in a dynamic and fast moving environment.
It is hard to accept that this is what the Limewire guys actually think, it is probably the concoction of a lawyer looking for a solid delaying tactic ahead of settlement
September 27th, 2006 at 3:27 am
this may be an old tactic, but I’m surprised by the supportive press the mainstream news is giving LimeWire. I’ve been googlng the articles, and there is virtually no support for the RIAA’s case.
I expect that will change tomorrow when the mainstream press get their writing orders.
September 27th, 2006 at 4:51 am
As I understand it, the corporate bloodlines are relatively thin between the news reporting media and the recording industry. If this were an MPAA case, /then/ I’d expect large scale parroting of plaintiff press releases.
P . S . Go Limewire!
September 27th, 2006 at 5:01 am
Anyone thinking you need the support of a blogger or a journalist to win a case where there are extensive precedents is severely misguided.
It seems to be a tactic wholly adopted by this site tto duke it out in the media or away from the court of law considering a matter.
P.S. just checked nothing in the journalism degree that qualifies journalists to become the judge and jury of trials
September 27th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
WTF are you talking about? It’s like you are in the middle of a conversation. How about starting with what you are talking about then expressing your opinion? And to which precedents are you refering?
October 18th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
While the RIAA is wrong morally, This suit about RIAA stymying competiton by using accusations of copyright infringement will very likely be thrown out by the judge. Judges are usually critters which rule by court procedures, previous rulings, lawyerspeak, and their specific interpetation of the law. The Constitutionality or morality of said procedures, rules, precendences, or interpetations can be damned as far as most judges are concerned.
In my humble opinion, what LimeWire needs to do is show that it also provides large scale distribution of non-infringing, independent content such as freely released music from local bands, independent or GNU software, and video files. An example of this would be my congregation intent of using Limewire to redistribute videos of sermons delivered every Sabbath. This type of redistribution of content is legit, and is the only way my congregation can afford to spread the message. We are considering the likes of Limewire and Bittorrent due to the fact that video files are huge and it would save on costs of bandwidth if distributed via peer to peer networking.