LimeWire

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2000 · Lime Wire LLC, New York, running on the Gnutella file-sharing network · Also known as Lime Wire; LimeWire Pro; LimeWire Pirate Edition

What it is

LimeWire was a free computer program for swapping files with strangers. You typed in the name of a song, and it searched the computers of everyone else running the program at that moment. You picked a file from the list of results and it copied across, usually slowly, straight from their machine to yours. Most of what people traded was music they hadn't paid for, which broke copyright law.

Where it came from

Mark Gorton's company, Lime Wire LLC, released it in 2000. It ran on Gnutella, an open network with no central server. That mattered after courts shut down Napster, an earlier music-swapping service that did depend on central servers, in 2001. LimeWire spread by word of mouth and became one of the most used file-sharing programs of the 2000s. Record labels sued, and in October 2010 US federal judge Kimba Wood ordered it to stop working. The labels' side floated damages of up to $72 trillion, which the judge reportedly called absurd, and the company settled in 2011 for $105 million.

How people used it

People, a lot of them teenagers on the family computer, searched for a song, watched the download bar crawl, then copied the file onto an MP3 player or burned it to a CD for friends. Files were often mislabelled: a song credited to the wrong band, a live recording, a joke track, or a few seconds of someone shouting. Some were viruses dressed up as music, and plenty of families blamed LimeWire when the computer ground to a halt. Some people paid for LimeWire Pro, which promised faster downloads. Others used cracked copies of Pro that they'd found on LimeWire itself.

Why it mattered

For about ten years it was how a large share of a generation built a music collection, before cheap legal downloads were normal and before Spotify reached most countries. It put the record industry in open conflict with its own customers, since the RIAA (the US record labels' trade body) was also suing thousands of individual downloaders in the same years. When streaming arrived, many people said they paid for it because it was easier than pirating. LimeWire is remembered with a mix of fondness and embarrassment, as the program that got everyone free music and wrecked the family PC.

The jokes around it

• "I downloaded a song on LimeWire and got a virus instead": the memory almost every user claims to share.
• Songs credited to the wrong, more famous band, so people learned the wrong names for years.
• "My parents still blame LimeWire for killing the computer."
• The $72 trillion damages figure, quoted as proof the record labels had lost the plot.
• The LimeWire name was later bought and reused for an NFT marketplace, which people treated as a joke in itself.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People put up with slow downloads, wrong songs and real risk to their computers as long as the music was free and the alternative was a shop. It also shows that most young users didn't think of copying a song as stealing, whatever the law said.

What noah is not sure of

The settlement was reportedly agreed in May 2011. The claim that the judge called the $72 trillion figure absurd is from memory of press coverage. The 2022 reuse of the LimeWire name for an NFT marketplace by unrelated owners is from memory and not in the source text.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.