LimeWire was available at no cost. The software is the brainchild of Mark Gorton, who himself came from a finance and engineering background.
Gorton earned electrical engineering degrees from Yale and Stanford, respectively, and then moved on to work for a defense contractor. Over the course of the next five years, he worked for various Wall-Street-based companies, including Credit Suisse and First Boston.
In , Gorton made his first foray into entrepreneurship by founding Tower Research Capital, a hedge fund that utilized quantitative trading and investment strategies. He even incorporated a separate entity called Lime Brokerage which created high-frequency trading software to place trades. Around the same time, the P2P file-sharing craze slowly begun to take off as more and more people gained access to computers and the internet at large.
The most prominent of the bunch was Napster , which launched in the summer of Napster had amassed millions of users within a matter of months, at one point even making it one of the most frequented websites in the United States. Nevertheless, Napster began facing legal troubles almost as soon as it launched, which ultimately led to its demise you can read more about the company by following the link above!
Gorton decided to capitalize on the P2P craze by launching a service of his own. LimeWire was initially released in May — without much public attention. Gnutella, the protocol that LimeWire was built upon and which just launched months prior , was gaining so much popularity that its network simply became overwhelmed, which led to download speeds being extremely slow. One of the major features that set LimeWire apart was a feature called heartbeat ping and heartbeat pong.
It allowed the network to reorganize itself so that heavy traffic nodes would connect with other heavy traffic nodes while the slower connections would be unaffected. Furthermore, LimeWire was troubled by demand simply outstripping available supply. There were only a few clients available on its network while demand for downloads was exponentially higher. The tide eventually turned when Napster was forced to shut itself down on July 1 st , Many of its existing users eventually began using LimeWire for a variety of reasons.
For once, LimeWire was less aggressive in displaying ads within its software than some of its competitors at the time, which included BearShare, Morpheus, and KaZaA. Second, many of those competing platforms hosted files that contained viruses. LimeWire had built tools that were scanning files more rigorously, thus offering a much safer experience. There were other problems brought about by LimeWire, particularly with illegal porn, which forced lawyers back in the day to deal with cases they might not otherwise see.
Listen to what this guy has to say about the trouble it caused. This Pirate Edition has software based on the LimeWire 5. However, the LimeWire team was accused of having a hand in the development of the Pirate Edition, and so they acted to shut the Pirate Edition down. There was a trial in May to decide on the amount of money that LimeWire owed to 13 record companies due to the large amount of copyrighted songs on the site and the number of times they had been downloaded.
There was also FrostWire, which was created in by members of the LimeWire open source community, as well as WireShare. This is the abridged history of LimeWire. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. Nov 10, , am EST. Nov 9, , pm EST. Nov 9, , am EST. He made a point to form relationships with music industry executives, and did his best to address any legally questionable areas in the software.
According to the New York Times , Gorton truly believed he was following the law the entire time. At its peak, LimeWire was responsible for 80 percent of all illegally downloaded music in the U.
Millennials had their first taste of infinite on-demand entertainment, and they were hooked. Meanwhile, as more users piled in, so too did bad actors. Jones: We were coming from a decade where the record companies had been systematically screwing every single human on CDs, refusing to sell singles anymore. It allowed record companies to charge us all a buttload for the one song that was good, which is why an entire generation knows way more Bush songs than they should, which is one half of one song.
Klee: Without the discoverability of browsing or algorithms, you had to know what you wanted and fully commit to the hunt. LimeWire rewarded focus and patience instead of promoting distraction.
Castro: Movies were more of a hassle. The only thing you had to go by were the titles of the tracks, and people could bait you into downloading some fucked-up shit. Jones: One infamous mislabeled file was an advertisement for a club that started with Bill Clinton saying:. I did, however, go to ifreeclub. Computers, notebooks and accessories. Televisions, home importable audio and video, fashion and cosmetics, housewares and more. Visit them today at www. Just get it free! Castro: [The Bill Clinton] sample was the original rickroll.
It taught us to keep vigilant and make sure that the file size of what we were downloading was correct. Castro: There was also a lot of porn, like, a lot. And of course, with porn, comes some fucked-up shit. One study by the U. Castro: It was even reported that out of randomly downloaded files on LimeWire , 37 of them contained malware.
If you were downloading content from the program, chances are you probably had a handful of viruses on your computer. Nobody cared. It was a small price to pay for the infinite amount of music at your disposal. Everything else we were largely laissez-faire about. In our view, it was actually a compelling argument for our new music service. Sometimes you take a chance and hope for no viruses.
Klee: Apart from the viruses and smut, there were always rumors that users would one day be dragged into court over this unrepentant piracy. Jones: Yeah, we had a vague sense that our galactic-scale larceny was probably some kind of violation of a university honor code or regulation or law, but no one had actually explicitly said anything about not doing it.
There were just thick blue ethernet cables for everyone and a big shrug from all authority figures, like some kind of Oklahoma land-run. It was glorious. I filed for bankruptcy years ago; the RIAA never got a dime from me, while I — hopefully — cost them millions of dollars to litigate me. It felt very unfair, but I have the satisfaction of knowing they were more hurt by the lawsuit than I was. Castro: The music industry was pissed, and someone needed to hang for it.
0コメント