Filesharing service Limewire will pay the record companies that took it to court $105 million. The two sides reached a settlement after five years of legal argument.
A consortium of 13 companies was suing Limewire for copyright infringement on a “massive scale”, and accused it of being responsible for as much as a billion dollars in lost music sales.
Which makes $105 million look like a pretty good deal, actually.
Limewire was the last survivor of the filesharing boom, which started in the 1990s with Napster and crazier from there.
While Napster and others got sued, bought out, closed down and generally stomped upon, Limewire managed to hang on until October last year when it was closed down by order of the judge.
Of course, that doesn’t mean filesharing is dead – far from it. There remain many ways to share files, legally or otherwise. Anyway, the music industry has more battles to fight now, what with the launch of cloud-based music storage services by Amazon and Google, neither of which were built with the industry’s permission or participation.
Who wants to bet that those lawyers won’t be out of the courtroom for long?
(Via Reuters)