Limegate Update: Revival at the Hands of “Piratical Monkeys”

Yeah, this one is almost as insane as it sounds. In one of last week’s posts, I covered how LimeWire LLC was court-ordered to end its operations and shut down its peer-to-peer file sharing network. This was depressing news to many users (including myself) who have relied on LimeWire to handle our circumventive file acquisition needs over at least the last five years.

While I suggested in my post that BitTorrent technology may provide safe haven for those users that have no interest in paying $30 for a 1080p rip of James Cameron’s Avatar, a media liberation cyberpunk known only as “MetaPirate” led to the revival of the file sharing system by releasing LimeWire: Pirate Edition. According to Nate Anderson at Ars Technica, “LimeWire Pirate Edition builds on the old LimeWire codebase, but it removes LimeWire’s use of some centralized servers, the Ask.com toolbar, in-app advertising, and software backdoors. It also enables all the features of the “Pro” version that LimeWire LLC used to sell as a premium product.”

The coders behind LimeWire’s rerelease described it as, “A horde of piratical monkeys climbed aboard the abandoned ship, mended its sails, polished its cannons and released it FREE to the community to help keep the Gnutella network alive.”

LimeWire Pirate Edition, courtesy of Ars Technica.

 

In an email correspondence with Ars Technica, MetaPirate described his/her motives as, “Speaking for myself, the motivation is to make RIAA lawyers cry into their breakfast cereal… I hope the other monkeys have nobler intentions.” Believing in the perseverance of LimeWire as a symbol of free file exchange, MetaPirate says, “You can spend years and millions of dollars knocking something down, and it will just get back up. Not an equivalent, not a replacement, but the exact same thing. The Pirate Bay has really demonstrated the importance of that.” Fittingly, the tagline for the new software is, “You can’t keep a good app down.”

The LimeWire Pirate Edition site hosts a plethora of locations from which users can download the new software for Windows, Mac, and Linux, ensuring no user platform has to go without LimeWire’s services. The site’s “About” section claims, “LimeWire Pirate Edition is free, open source P2P software. It does not include any adware or spyware, and it cannot be remotely monitored or shut down.”

A Media Pirate Vessel Sinks

As of Oct. 27th, user-friendly, popular, and ancient (est. 2000) peer-to-peer file sharing network Limewire was shut down by a court-ordered injunction. After almost a decade of legal sparring with the Recording Industry Association of America, founder Mark Gorton’s brainchild was ordered by Judge Kimba Wood to shut down. Wood concluded that because of Limewire, the RIAA “suffered – and will continue to suffer – irreparable harm from LimeWire’s inducement of widespread infringement of their works.”

The RIAA’s history of handling copyright infringement makes their case hard to sympathize with. But while the RIAA has a reputation for being copyright

I don't think this is actual RIAA propaganda, but you get the gist of it.

fascists, Limewire’s plight is nothing new. It follows the precedent set by Napster and Kazaa before it. However, the RIAA has yet to fully tackle the Marxist media monolith of torrent file sharing.

While Limewire served its purpose best in distributing individual .mp3 files and perhaps albums, torrent systems allow users to download unlimited amounts of data (let’s say, the entire series of Seinfeld). Torrent systems such as uTorrent and Azureus still allow users to download media content, free from copyright infringement enforcers. And, in the meantime, any number of file hosting sites allow users to upload files (including full-length films, albums, etc.) for any user to download.

Though the RIAA has tried for over a decade to end music piracy, the constant evolution of sharing (a.k.a. stealing) technology makes it too difficult to keep up with. Check out this timeline of file-sharing technology (note that while it mentions The Pirate Bay was shut down under a court injunction, it appealed; it awaits a verdict from a Swedish court on Nov. 26th).

RIAA archnemesis the Electronic Frontier Foundation gives you tips here on how to NOT be sued by the RIAA.

For a tutorial in torrent file acquisition, check out this video: