Lime Wire’s Marketing Says It All, RIAA Says in Final Brief

The RIAA filing makes a major point of a half-hearted effort by Lime Wire to create an effective copyright filter after the Grokster decision. Lime Wire earlier had argued that the major labels blocked its attempt to operate as a licensed store, to maintain the labels’ early monopoly on digital sales (WID Jan 23/07 p2).

Lime Wire’s P2P client, LimeWire, “is good for one thing and used for one thing -- massive infringement,” the RIAA said, putting the software in the same league as the shuttered Grokster, Morpheus, Aimster, Kazaa and early Napster. Company employees “left their fingerprints all over advertisements, business plans, technology development and press releases, all intended to make [P2P client] LimeWire ’the next Napster,'” RIAA said.

The filing is studded with black-outs of statements on specific pieces of evidence that Lime Wire executives knew the vast majority of users were downloading illicitly. Acknowledgments of that kind include Lime Wire’s 2001 “offering memorandum” and internal documents drafted soon after the client launched in 2000, a month after Napster’s initial injunction, the RIAA said. The company contacted “Napster-banned colleges,” and former CEO Mark Gorton -- named in the RIAA suit -- apparently cited the client’s popularity on campuses in an April 2000 fundraising letter, the filing hinted at in another redacted portion. Lime Wire repeatedly compared itself to Napster before it acquired licenses -- both in-house by circulating clips of articles on Napster and in a public financial document, the filing said. The company also bid in 2002 through Google AdWords for “scores of keywords” related to Grokster, Morpheus and Kazaa, RIAA said.

In one of the few unredacted citations referring to an employee, the RIAA quoted a former Lime Wire senior software engineer as saying that the company and other P2P companies were “entirely built off of infringement,” and that unlike Skype -- built on Kazaa’s FastTrack P2P network -- Lime Wire “makes all its money off of infringing content.” It made money by increasing its numbers of users shown ads in the free “Basic” version of the software, the RIAA said.

Lime Wire didn’t develop a copyright filter until a year after Grokster, and it defaulted to “off,” unlike the client’s other filters, the filing said. RIAA said the filter was meant to be ineffective. A redacted portion says that Lime Wire’s chief financial officer worried “about Lime Wire’s liability in light of the Grokster Court’s discussion of filtering,” apparently meaning that the company thought that its network had to remain dumb, in network-speak, to avoid secondary liability for users’ infringement. Two full pages of the filing are nearly blank. They seem to concern internal divisions at Lime Wire over what sort of filter to use, including discussion of an “easy and cheap option to reduce infringement” that Lime Wire rejected.

Repeated sharing of fully and even partially downloaded files was built into the LimeWire client, the filing said, citing discussions among Lime Wire’s lawyer, developers and Greg Bildson, chief technology officer. Bildson told the New York Post that “RIAA is not going to be able to contain this problem” of LimeWire users masking their identities through the client, the filing said. Lime Wire’s own forum operators told frustrated users how to avoid decoy files planted by antipiracy services. The company was “'in court against the RIAA right now,'” one said, according to the filing. “'The forums have to be careful.'”

The LimeWire client was built to avoid liability for the “centralized search” that ensnared Napster, the filing said. The former senior software engineer said the client “could never compete with the speed of collaborative filtering of centralized search,” the filing said. But several redacted portions suggest that the company traded off functionality to try to improve its legal position.