Court Squeezes LimeWire

Image via CrunchBase

LimeWire, one of the largest commercial P2P music downloading services, was rocked this week by U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Judge Kimba Wood, who ruled for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on its claims of copyright infringement, unfair competition, and inducing others to commit copyright infringement.

The 59-page opinion in  Arista Records, LLC et al. v. Lime Group, LLC (Case No. 1:06-cv-05936) found LimeWire, a software file sharing company, and its Chair, Mark Gorton, were both liable for inducing copyright infringement. According to the RIAA, more than 200 million copies of LimeWire's software has been downloaded to date.

Besides the free software version, LimeWire sells an "Extended Pro" version for $34.95 annually. Although it outlasted Napster and other rivals, LimeWire has not kept pace with faster competitors such as BitTorrent.  Judge Wood will meet with the litigants on June 1, where topics such as monetary damages and the possibility of the parties collaborating in the future doubtless will be addressed.

UPDATE: Illegal Downloader Slammed to Tune of $675k

Image by arcticpenguin via Flickr

Twenty-five-year-old BU grad student Joel Tenenbaum of Providence, R.I., has been ordered by a Massachusetts jury to pay four record companies $675,000 in total for downloading 30 copyrighted songs in 2004 through the KaZaA peer-to-peer network.

Tenenbaum, only the second defendant in a music downloading case ever to go to trial in the nation, could have faced a judgment of up to $4.5 million under the copyright statute for willful infringement, rather than the $22,500 for each of the 30 tunes. (See "TUOL" post 7/28/09.) Tenenbaum's legal team, headed by Harvard Law Prof. Charles Nesson, is expected to appeal the verdict based on U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts Judge Nancy Gertner's ruling that precluded "fair use" as a defense.

The case is (Capitol Records, Inc. v. Noor Alaujan, Case No. 03-cv-11661; Sony BMG Music Entertainment et al. v. Joel Tenenbaum, Case No. 07-cv-114446).