TorrentFreak

With the annihilation of Grokster in the middle of the last decade and the recent destruction and humiliation of LimeWire, one might have thought that all prospective file-sharing developers would be proceeding with caution. Not so. In fact, some are painting big targets on their chests with “Sue Me!” right in the middle. Coding geniuses, it’s time to get smart.

In the midst of their jury trial, the company behind the defunct LimeWire client and the RIAA settled their dispute out of court. Limewire will pay $105 million to compensate the major music labels for damages suffered. A moment of justice for the music industry, but not necessarily for the artists. The recouped money is destined for reinvestment in new anti-piracy efforts and will not be used to compensate any artists.

Having been destroyed by the world’s largest recording labels, the LimeWire file-sharing service is little more than a corpse at this stage. Nevertheless, its destruction and burial is not quite over. This week LimeWire has been facing off with the record labels before a jury in New York to decide how much in damages it [...]

CNET’s Download.com and parent company CBS are being sued for several copyright infringement related offenses for their role in distributing LimeWire and other P2P software. The massive lawsuit is being brought by eccentric billionaire and FilmOn founder Alki David, who’s backed by a collection of rappers and R&B groups.

Today we have some good news for the major record labels. The renowned market research group NPD has found that close to half of all Americans who were pirating music via P2P applications a year ago, have reportedly stopped doing so. As a result the number of US music pirates decreased by 12 million. NPD attributes this unprecedented shift to the LimeWire shutdown, but we fear that it wont have any effect on record label revenues.

After LimeWire was ordered to cease its operations, the legal troubles continued for the file-sharing company. Dozens of record labels still demanded hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to compensate for their claimed losses. One of these lawsuits involving all the major music publishers has now been settled, reducing the potential damages to just a billion dollars the record labels are claiming in another case.

The CEO of publisher Ziff Davis has just had an ear bashing from not only the RIAA, but just about everyone in the music industry. It seems that the world’s recorded music leaders were more than a little annoyed when PC Mag reported on alternatives to LimeWire, going on to call ‘their’ report on a TorrentFreak article “nothing more than a roadmap for continued music piracy.” Confusingly, PC Mag didn’t actually write it. IDG’s PC World did.