Orange County – It seems that there is still some fight in the recording industry. 

In an October 2010 court injunction, LimeWire was ordered to stop distributing its downloading software.  LimeWire is a free peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) client program.  The ruling was a major victory for the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), which has been grappling for years with illegal file-sharing sites and downloads.  The ruling states that LimeWire “intended to encourage” copyright infringement through its efforts to attract infringing file-sharers, its efforts to enable and assist such infringement, and its failure to mitigate such activity.  LimeWire offered a filter on its site that blocked the download of copyrighted materials however, users were responsible for turning on the filter themselves. 

In a statement from the ruling, the judge said, “This selective filtering further demonstrates LW’s knowledge of infringement-mitigating technologies and the companies intentional decision not to employ any such technologies in a way that meaningfully deters LimeWire users’ infringing activities…is a strong indicator of intent to foster infringement.”

The damages trial is slated to begin on May 2, with the recording companies expected to demand up to $150,000 per infringed work.  Considering the number of infringing files that were downloaded, that adds up to a mere $75 Trillion.  So LimeWire goes bye bye and the beat goes on.

No further details of the settlement terms were available.