ArsTechnica is reporting that U.S. Federal Judge Kimba Wood of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has granted summary judgment against LimeWire in an action by brought by Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which claimed the peer-to-peer file-sharing service was facilitating copyright infringement.
Penalties against LimeWire and its CEO Mark Gorton will be set after a status conference on June 1.
During the legal proceedings, an expert witness called by the RIAA testified that in a sample of 1,800 LimeWire files he examined, 93 percent were copyrighted.
In other testimony it was revealed that LimeWire had opened a digital music store and used filtering to prevent users from sharing digital recordings purchased from it, but didn’t filter to prevent them from sharing anything else.
“In Wood’s view, this all adds up to a business model knowingly built on copyright infringement, and it continued with no attempt to address the massive problem,” according to the article in ArsTechnica (“LimeWire sliced by RIAA, guilty of massive infringement”)
More coverage here in Wall Street Journal: “CopyWrong! Kimba Wood Squeezes the Juice Out of Limewire”
This is big news for LimeWire users who never knew you were supposed to pay for music and the artists and recording companies who would like them to learn.
Tom Kelchner