Federal Court Disbands Gnutella’s Limewire Project

Showing once again that the RIAA holds absolute power over the music industry, another main source of free MP3 downloads has been closed off in the interest of protecting music artists’ intellectual property. Gnutella announced to their clients shortly after the lawsuit was lost that the Limewire project would be no more. That day, all of the Limewire servers were cut off from life support, effectively eliminating the runaway success of a P2P service overnight.

The RIAA stands firmly in their belief in intellectual property, an idea that has been challenged by many groups around the world. The question of whether or not an artist holds ultimate ownership and exclusive rights to music and other artistic works. The main opposition to the RIAA’s IP ideology is PPI, or the Pirate Parties International, who have stood strongly against continued lawsuits; far enough to establish their own political ideology, manifesto, and international policy organization. The first of the Pirate Parties was the Swedish Piratpartiet, who founded in the early 2000’s by a group of Internet-savvy teenagers with a knack for server management and a love for the emergent .Torrent files that swept the net after the infamous fall of Napster. The Piratpartiet went on to form The Pirate Bay, the largest online .Torrent file tracker and subject of many an international lawsuit.

Police raids of .Torrent servers and file-sharers have increased in volume since 2008 exponentially. Whether or not the RIAA and other Pro-IP groups have encouraged the police to step up their enforcement or have obtained lawful force by less than legal means remains a subject shrouded in mystery and red tape.