A file-sharing program that half the internet once had installed, a court order that switched it off, and what the name means now.
For most of the 2000s LimeWire was how people found files. It was free, it ran on almost any computer, and it searched a network that belonged to nobody. That made it enormously popular and, eventually, indefensible in court. This page lays out what happened, in order, without the folklore.
2000
Lime Wire LLC is founded in New York by Mark Gorton and releases LimeWire, a client for Gnutella — a peer-to-peer protocol published by Nullsoft developers Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper earlier that year. Unlike Napster, Gnutella keeps no central index, so there is no single server anyone can switch off.
2001
LimeWire Basic is released under the GNU General Public License. A paid edition, LimeWire Pro, connects to more sources at once and funds the company alongside advertising.
2004
Version 3.9.4 removes the bundled LimeShop adware after years of complaints. The same year members of the community start FrostWire, a fork built to stay free of any filtering code.
2007
By the time the lawsuit is filed LimeWire has close to four million users a day, and Gnutella carries more than 40% of all file-sharing traffic. Later versions add firewall-to-firewall transfers, a built-in messenger and encrypted connections.
2010
On 11 May Judge Kimba Wood rules that Lime Wire LLC induced copyright infringement. On 26 October a permanent injunction requires searching, downloading and file distribution to be disabled. Installed copies start showing a notice that the software has been switched off by court order.
2011
The labels argue for damages counted per download rather than per recording, which works out to a number larger than the world economy. The court calls that reading absurd and caps it per work. Two days into the damages trial the case settles for $105 million.
2012–2021
The company stops distributing software. The domain lapses and changes hands more than once. The Gnutella network keeps running without its best-known client, carried by forks that were never bound by the injunction.
2022
The LimeWire name and trademarks are acquired by a new owner with no connection to Lime Wire LLC, and relaunched as a web platform. Nothing from the original peer-to-peer network is reused: there is no client to install and no Gnutella network behind it.
2023–2025
An image generation tool is acquired in 2023 and folded into the platform, followed in 2025 by the instant local-network transfer services Snapdrop and ShareDrop, and by filetransfer.io. File sharing becomes the centre of the product again, this time in the browser.
Today
LimeWire is a file sharing and AI platform that runs in a browser tab. Files are uploaded to, and served from, infrastructure the company runs itself; nothing is fetched from other people’s computers, and nothing is indexed from a public network.
Thirteen record companies led by Arista Records sued Lime Wire LLC in 2006 for inducing copyright infringement. The court agreed in May 2010 and shut the file-sharing features down that October. The labels then asked for damages counted per download, a number that reached the trillions; the court refused to read the law that way and the case settled for $105 million. The $72 trillion figure has its own page.
It is gone, and that is the honest answer. The client was disabled by court order in 2010 and has not been distributed since. Installers still offered under the name on third-party sites are not ours and are not safe — the same search results were a well-documented malware channel even while the original program was alive.
There is nothing to install today. LimeWire runs in a browser tab: files are uploaded to infrastructure the company operates, and shared with a link. Nothing is pulled from a stranger’s computer, and nothing is published to a public index.
The name is the same; the company is not. Lime Wire LLC stopped operating the brand after the settlement. The trademarks were acquired in 2022 by a different company, which built a new product from scratch. No code, no network and no user data carried over from the 2000s, and no part of today’s service depends on peer-to-peer file sharing.
LimeWire was a free peer-to-peer file-sharing client, written in Java and first released in 2000. It ran on Windows, macOS, Linux and Solaris, and connected to the Gnutella network, which had no central catalogue and no company server holding the index.
LimeWire was created by Mark Gorton, whose company Lime Wire LLC was founded in New York in 2000. The Gnutella protocol it used was written separately, by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper at Nullsoft, earlier the same year.
Thirteen record companies led by Arista Records sued Lime Wire LLC in 2006. On 11 May 2010 Judge Kimba Wood found the company liable for inducing copyright infringement, and on 26 October 2010 a permanent injunction required the file-sharing features to be switched off. Lime Wire LLC settled with the labels for $105 million in May 2011.
Nowhere, and no copy found elsewhere is safe to trust. The original client was disabled by court order in 2010 and is no longer distributed. limewire.com today is a browser-based file sharing and AI platform; there is nothing to install.
No. Lime Wire LLC, the company sued in 2006, no longer operates the brand. The LimeWire name and trademarks were acquired in 2022 by a different company, which rebuilt the product from scratch as a web service. Nothing of the original peer-to-peer network was carried over.