Despite the good reviews from LimeWire users on the latest release, the management at Facebook was not amused. After having blocked The Pirate Bay’s “Share on Facebook” feature, the Internet’s largest social network has now threatened LimeWire that it will share the same fate.

Jason Herskowit, Vice President Product Management at LimeWire told TorrentFreak that Facebook has requested a number of changes to LimeWire’s Facebook integration after they introduced the new feature. LimeWire quickly complied with these requests, but that was not good enough.

“Unfortunately, this week we were contacted again. This time not with a change request, but with a notice that they were going to disable the feature,” Jason explained. “Rather than leave the users with a broken LimeWire, we decided to disable the feature before they did so. As an avid user of both Facebook and LimeWire myself, I am as disappointed by this as anyone.”

“It is unfortunate for us all, particularly considering that LimeWire and Facebook share the common vision of being ‘a place to connect and share’. We hope to find a way to work with Facebook to re-enable the features that you guys continue to ask for and we sincerely apologize for having to remove this feature in the near-term,” Jason added.

Facebook has yet to issue a statement on the LimeWire ban but it is likely that the company doesn’t want to be associated with file-sharing applications or sites, even though they are perfectly legal.

After The Pirate Bay was blocked a Facebook spokesperson told TorrentFreak: “Facebook respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of ‘Share on Facebook’ links on sites that contain any content that is infringing,” and it seems that they will do the same to applications that can possibly be used to download copyrighted content.

Facebook was asked for a comment but they have yet to respond. The good news for BitTorrent users is that the share feature on The Pirate Bay is working again, as the site’s operators have implemented a workaround that lifted the block.

Feel free to share this article on Facebook while you still can.

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The entertainment industries were not happy with the new feature, but since The Pirate Bay is not exclusively used to spread copyrighted material, there wasn’t much they could do about it. Facebook users responded positively and many began posting torrent links in their profile. This integration of the world’s largest tracker and the world’s largest social networking site generated hundreds of news articles and excitement. But it wasn’t to last.

This morning Facebook decided to put an end to the sharing and blocked not only the feature, but all links to Pirate Bay’s torrents. The ‘Share on Facebook’ button on the TPB torrent download pages doesn’t work anymore, and neither does the Facebook bookmarklet. Manually adding a link to your Facebook messages isn’t allowed either, regardless of the “legality” of the content it’s linking to. Facebook has basically launched a site-wide ban of Pirate Bay torrent URLs.

Any message containing a torrent URL, like this one, is blocked. According to the message you’ll see on Facebook it is because it “has been reported as abusive by Facebook users” but this is inaccurate. Facebook is actively blocking the links, also for new torrents and ‘legal’ torrents that are uploaded by artist who want to share their work.

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told TorrentFreak, “Facebook respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of ‘Share on Facebook’ links on sites that contain “any content that is infringing. Given the controversy surrounding The Pirate Bay and the pending lawsuit against them, we’ve reached out to The Pirate Bay and asked them to remove the ‘Share on Facebook’ links from their site. The Pirate Bay has not responded and so we have blocked their torrents from being shared on Facebook.”

Interestingly, links from thepiratebay.se are still accepted. The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that this is plain censorship and said he will try to come up with a workaround so people can continue to share. “I’ll fix it later today so it will have a link to a redirect site or something,” he said.

Since Facebook’s Terms of Service forbid any acts of copyright infringement, the company wouldn’t generally be responsible for infringements committed by their users. However, just as a torrent site is expected to respond to DMCA takedown notices, so is Facebook. If, after being notified of an infringement Facebook fails to take action, it could itself become liable. Add this to the prospect of a growing administrative headache linked to a rising tide of DMCA takedown notices generated by TPB torrents, and Facebook probably decided it had enough grounds to justify a ban.

Facebook’s censorship policies are not very consistent though. Mininova and isoHunt, two other large BitTorrent sites remain unaffected, even though isoHunt offers the exact same ‘Share on Facebook’ feature as The Pirate Bay previously did.

Thanks to liquidmonkey

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That’s not all though, the team has recently rolled out a new feature which is almost guaranteed to spark controversy. Visitors to a torrent details page on the site – such as this random Ubuntu torrent – will notice the addition of a brand new button labeled ‘Share on Facebook’.

Users clicking this button will be taken to the Facebook where the torrent will be added to the user’s profile. Anyone browsing the user’s profile page can simply click on the torrent and provided a torrent client is installed, download begins straightaway with no need to visit the Pirate Bay site.

The entertainment industries are obviously not amused by this new feature. A representative from the IFPI told the Swiss newspaper 20 Minuten that offering links to torrents that point to copyright works is illegal in Switzerland, while referring to the ShareReactor case .

Increasingly, social networking sites such as Facebook are used to share files with users linking to BitTorrent sites or file-hosters such as Rapidshare and Megaupload. Anti-piracy outfits see this as a new threat and request the site’s operators to remove the links.

Two weeks ago the Brazilian recording industry took action and managed to pressure the moderators of one of the largest groups on Google’s social network Orkut to shut down their group. But, when the 921,000 member group was closed, new ones soon took its place and the sharing continued.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde says that they haven’t seen any complaints regarding the new feature. “As far as I know, no rights-holders have complained to us yet,” while noting that any complaints they do receive get deleted immediately.

When asked if The Pirate Bay had permission from FaceBook to implement the new feature, Sunde said they didn’t feel the need to ask. “They monitoring their protal every day – they should have noticed it long ago,” he added. Facebook declined to comment on the issue.

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Previously, we have reported on other WebUI tools, such as uTorrent widgets, a mobile version of uTorrent, and even an iPhone compatible WebUI. The Facebook application for uTorrent is another example of how the WebUI can be used to integrate uTorrent into other applications.

The uFacebook home page lists all the torrents that are loaded in uTorrent, including statistics such as the current upload and download speed of each file. Once the application is installed, you can remotely start, stop, delete, add, and even search torrents, no matter where you are. That is, if your PC is turned on with uTorrent running.

uFacebook is developed and maintained by the same people who run the BitTorrent meta-search engine Morrent. In addition to this app, the Morrent team has also developed a uTorrent WebUI for the iPhone, and a gadget for the Windows sidebar.

If you want to give it a try, make sure you have enabled the WebUI. To do so, go to Options ,> Preferences ,> Advanced ,> WebUI, and enter you details there. Detailed instructions on how to install the Facebook application, and how to configure the WebUI can be found here.

While you’re at it, feel free to join the TorrentFreak page on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

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