

LimeWire Crushed in RIAA Infringement Suit - grellas
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/limewire-crushed/

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barnaby
It's all part of a natural cycle.

New media companies are being sued by old media companies because the old
media companies bought the laws that made what the new media companies are
doing illegal ...

just like how the old media companies were sued by older companies like Kodak
who paid to have the laws make the recording industry illegal...

When companies like LimeWire or BitTorrent become multi-Billion dollar
corporations, they will pay to have copyright law rewritten in such a way to
prevent the next generation of competitors.

See, it's a cycle.

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jared314
Gandhi was right. You just have to survive the "then they fight you" part.

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shrikant
Can someone explain why the CEO was held 'personally liable'?[1] Whenever
companies behave like (at best) like dipshits, I've only ever seen 'the
corporation is a person' and hence liable. Why single out the CEO personally
in this one? Is this at the judge's discretion?

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/major-
copyri...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/major-copyright-
defeat-tastes-sour-for-limewire.ars)

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madmaze
Im not sure I understand how LimeWire is liable, sure they offer the software,
but the infringement is done by their users and not the company themselves

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tptacek
If you know that your users are infringing copyrights, as Limewire surely
does, and you facilitate that copyright infringement, as Limewire arguably
does by providing P2P software principally to copyright infringers (as does
seems empirically to be the case), and your product has little other purpose
outside of copyright infringement (unlike, say, BitTorrent by itself), and you
receive direct financial benefit from the actions of infringers, as Limewire
does by charging ~$35 for their software, then you are exposed to a bunch of
different vectors for indirect copyright infringement.

This is not a particularly complicated legal area, except to the extent that
it necessarily skirts a bunch of grey areas in copyright law.

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qeorge
_" your product has little other purpose outside of copyright infringement"_

That's the killer right there. LimeWire needed to show a fair use of its
product, and failed to do so.

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jrockway
This is like holding Boeing liable for 9/11.

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JMiao
except boeing doesn't encourage terrorists to hop aboard.

~~~
jrockway
But Boeing was negligent in not making the plane refuse to fly itself into a
skyscraper.

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YogSothoth
I'm thinking this might be more like head shops. They sell water pipes that
are surely used almost exclusively for illegal activities but _can_ be used
for non-illegal activities (i.e. smoking tobacco). I don't recall the head
shops being asked to produce an actual example of a person smoking tobacco
through one of their water pipes, how does this differ exactly?

