And so back to P2P, with the news that a US judge has thrown out an antitrust lawsuit launched by P2P firm LimeWire against the major record companies.
LimeWire, of course, are currently defending a copyright infringement launched against them by the record industry last year. It's the first lawsuit against a P2P maker in the US since the landmark 2005 MGM v Grokster ruling which made it harder for file sharing software makers to sidestep liability for the copyright infringement they enable. While Grokster did leave some room for movement for the P2P firms - mainly in the way you present your product to consumers - many experts reckon LimeWire will not be able to distinguish themselves from the Grokster case, noting that much of their defence relies on legal arguments rejected by the Supreme Court in 2005. That case is still going through the motions and, of course, in the meantime LimeWire's technology continues to provide easy access to lots of illegal content.
After the labels sued, LimeWire did what any good American corporation does when faced with litigation, they countersued. In was the countersuit that was being considered by a Federal judge in New York this week. The P2P firm claimed that the record companies colluded in a bid to stop them launching a licensed file sharing business by collectively deciding not to licence LimeWire their music. They also claimed the major record companies had damaged their business by price fixing in the download domain, that they had hacked LimeWire's file-sharing network, and that they had defamed the corporation by alleging it enabled the distribution of child pornography.
But Judge Gerard E Lynch was having none of it. He said LimeWire had failed to show that the labels' decisions to not licence their music to the P2P company was anything but "independent decision-making by each company to refrain from doing business". On the other allegations, he said the P2P firm couldn't demonstrate how any of those things - if they did happen - had actually damaged their business. As a result, he dismissed the countersuit.