Filesharing certainly hasn't disappeared, and every day, millions of songs and albums are traded on the internet free of charge, which is hurting musicians more than the extremely low payout rates most streaming platforms offer. In this three-part series, I examine a handful of the brands that pushed illegal downloading of music onto the masses, looking at what they did and here those names are now. Part one examined what Napster looks like today, the second article focuses on the citrusy company Limewire and the third will examine Kazaa.

Another file-sharing software program, FrostWire was actually designed by members of the LimeWire open source community, and it functions similarly to LimeWire. As of right now, the site has not been shut down.


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Limewire was one of the most popular P2P clients in the 2000's. It allowed millions to download music, images, software, and videos, as well. But its legacy is also tainted with darkness. The network no longer operates and, still, we can take out valuable lessons from it. So, in this article, we'll dive into the rise and fall of Limewire.

There was almost no filtering and control, and users could access millions of random servers worldwide. So, hackers took full advantage. They littered the Limewire ecosystem with viruses, warez, and bugs. So, there was no guarantee the next download wouldn't kill your computer.

Limewire's system was so loose that you could download Limewire Pro within Limewire. For free! The only problem was it could end up being a virus. That's how Limewire was one of the most popular illegal music downloading sites of the 2000s.

And, still, this wasn't the worst thing about Limewire. Unfortunately, it became littered with child pornography. So, you could be downloading what you think is your favorite movie but instead end up in possession of illegal material.

It's heartbreaking that child pornography carried on in Limewire until it shut down. Authorities made considerable efforts to stop this, but they could only track individuals instead of an entire P2P system.

The music industry wanted to make illegal downloads harder to come by. Their strategy was simple, attack the source, and the evidence was there. For example, Limewire increased its revenue from $6 million in 2004 to $20 million in 2006, profiting while the RIAA and its companies lost money.

And, let's remember: the RIAA isn't small. So, once the RIAA sued you, you either settled or settled and tried to go legit. Limewire tried the second, to no avail. And, from a legal standpoint, the RIAA was right. So, Judge Wood agreed: the downloads were illegal.

So, both sides had to compromise. In 2010, the judge ruled that Limewire had to cease activities and pay for damages. Still, that doesn't mean that you can't find a downloadable Limewire. There's still out there. After all, Limewire didn't have to pay $75 trillion. In the end, Limewire settled with the record industry for $100 million, then shut down operations. But it left its mark. Just weeks after the lawsuit, a group of hackers created a fork version of Limewire called Limewire pirate edition.

People will continue to find creative ways to download Limewire and other stuff. And, indeed, if they want to know about the origins, they'll look back at history, and they'll see how this platform helped shaped content today.


LimeWire was shut down in October 2010 as a result of a legal battle between the company and the Recording Industry Association of America. The company rebranded back in May 2022 and launched as a marketplace for NFTs.

LimeWire was available at no cost. If users wanted to up their download speeds and search results as well as receiving access to tech support, they could opt into LimeWire Pro for a yearly fee of $21.95.

Despite (or rather because of) its overwhelming success, LimeWire eventually had to face legal consequences as well. In August 2006, the RIAA (which also managed to shut down Napster in 2001) filed a lawsuit against Lime Wire LLC.

Subsequent reports and TV documentaries revealed other sensitive information that was being shared on LimeWire. For instance, more than 150,000 tax returns and almost 626,000 credit reports were uploaded on its network for download.

In June 2010, they asked a New York federal court to shut down the platform. Furthermore, the record labels demanded more than $1 billion in compensation for all the songs that had been illegally exchanged on LimeWire.

After mounting legal pressures, LimeWire eventually decided to shut down its music store on December 31st, 2010. A few months later, in May 2011, LimeWire finally settled with the RIAA for a total of $105 million.

The LimeWire site shut down its service Wednesday, displaying only a legal notice announcing that that company "is under a court-ordered injunction to stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software."

Great news if you're feeling nostalgic for the halcyon days of the middle of the last decade, that era when the music industry's battles with file-sharing networks left the Internet scattered with the burnt-out shells (ahem, legitimate music stores) of Napster and Kazaa. Yesterday, a U.S. District Court judge ordered LimeWire, one of the increasingly scarce peer-to-peer file sharing networks, to cease operations of its searching, downloading, file trading and distribution features immediately.

The decision came down as a part of a lawsuit filed against LimeWire in 2006 by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the body which represents the interests of the many record labels, including the four remaining major labels (EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner).

Lime Group, the owner of the LimeWire software, was found liable of copyright infringement in the lawsuit in May. Lime Group has also been ordered to "use all reasonable technological means to immediately cease and desist the current infringement" pursued by users who had downloaded the application before the decision.

LimeWire has said it has more than 50 million monthly users. These users accounted for 58 percent of people who said they downloaded music from a peer-to-peer service in 2009, a survey by NPD Group showed.


It all started with Lars Ulrich. Before he sued Napster back in 2000 and won, illegal downloading wasn't even illegal. No one really knew what it was. But after that case, hundreds of aggrieved musicians, record labels, and countries tried to stop people like me downloading Limp Bizkit's back catalog for free. Just yesterday Isohunt, a pirate website that didn't actually host any MP3s itself but just had a directory for websites where you could download them, was ordered to pay about $50 million to a music-industry group called "Music Canada." The UK government is planning on putting the maximum sentence for online piracy up to ten years inside for the most serious offenses, according the Office of Intellectual Property.

Of course, when Napster launched, places like Virgin Megastores and Tower Records were charging in excess of $20 for an album and often more for a film or box set. The entertainment industry generally treated the public with disregard, and people felt ripped off. So there was a fair amount of delight in sticking it to them and downloading terabytes worth of free songs. If you need a comparison for this day and age, imagine if someone built another railway line right next to every Amtrak train track and then ran the service for nothing, and then Amtrak came out and said, "Yes we know the free track is there, but the moral thing to do is support us."

Eventually the music industry worked out that it couldn't just bash people with the proverbial stick, and it created the carrot of way cheaper legal downloading and streaming services, while also going around closing down the websites that had almost destroyed its business.

So, as I was feeling particularly blue this week, I decided to try download Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" for free on every old pirate website, to see if any of them had sprung back up in my absence.

This is what you get when you get on to the Napster website these days: some generic looking music-streaming site in the guise of Apple Music or Spotify. Apparently after getting chinned by years of high-profile lawsuits, Napster decided to shut down its original pirate incarnation. But after getting bought out by US electronic retailers Best Buy, and later merging with Rhapsody, it has since rebranded itself as a paid for streaming service (a.k.a. sold out to the fucking system, man). I won't be finding a free copy of a classic folk ballad here.

When I was growing up, the main bad boy of the downloading game was always Limewire. Sure, it had more viruses than you could shake a stick at and was horribly slow, but it was always user-friendly. So it was a massive shame when I tried to click on www.limewire.com only to be met with another "site can't be found" page. I started having a look at various downloadable options and almost went for the one below, but then thought about how many viruses used to fuck up my computers back in the day and had a little pause.

After doing some research, I found that Limewire had actually been shut down way back in 2010 after more lawsuits and court hijinks, so there were no new working versions available. Various wikis explained that not only do old versions not work, they also have many trojan horses in them, and I didn't want to take the risk and not be able to finish the rest of this article.

Finally then, to Soulseek, trusty old Soulseek. Soulseek was the worst-looking, least user-friendly of the big P2P networks. It was the illegal downloading site your older brother used. Perhaps for that reason people didn't seem that bothered about knocking it off the internet and whaddayaknow, it's still operational.

It offered me a free download of the program. After opening the file, my firewall protector went a bit nuts, but was I about to back down now, when I was so close to the mellifluous sounds of S&G? No way. So I proceeded to search for the seminal 1964 track, and boy was I not disappointed. A a whole bunch of versions came up straight away. 0852c4b9a8

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