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Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC · S.D.N.Y. · 06 Civ. 5936
A number larger than the economy of the planet it was filed on.
2000 · New York
A Gnutella client written in Java.
No account. No catalogue. No server to switch off — your machine talking to everyone else's, and a search box that returned whatever the world happened to be holding.
2007 · Peak
On roughly one PC in three.
The most installed file-sharing application on earth, and the most sued.
Meanwhile, on the rest of the internet
lol, limewire
Two words that did more for the brand than any campaign ever did. Fifteen years of jokes about viruses, mislabelled MP3s and a ruined family PC — free advertising for a program that no longer existed.
August 2006 · The complaint
11 May 2010 · Summary judgment
GUILTY OF INDUCEMENT
Judge Kimba Wood found that LimeWire had induced copyright infringement on a massive scale.
26 October 2010 · Injunction
The client goes dark.
2011 · The damages demand
Then they did the multiplication.
Statutory damages counted per infringement rather than per work. Run that across every song and every download and the arithmetic arrives somewhere no court had been.
The court's answer
ABSURD
Damages were capped at one award per work, not one per download. The trillions evaporated in a paragraph.
May 2011 · Settled, two days into trial
One hundred and five million dollars — about 0.00015% of what had been asked — and LimeWire stopped existing.
2003 — 2008 · The other defendants
“i just wanted to download college girls gone wild”
as quoted in the news segment below
While the labels fought the software, they also went after the people using it. Tens of thousands of letters and settlement demands went out to students, parents and strangers who had no idea what a Gnutella node was. Most paid a few thousand dollars rather than face a courtroom.
2011 — 2021
Eleven years of nothing. The name stayed famous for one thing: being the reason the family computer stopped working.
2022
The name comes back.
29 September 2026 · @limewire