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By Eriq Gardner
The $1 billion legal case against LimeWire is turning into the modern day equivalent of the story of the judgment of King Solomon -- the tale of the Hebrew leader who told two women fighting over a baby to cut the child in half in order to determine which of the women really wanted to save the baby's life. Similarly, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood has been tasked with figuring out who has the best interests of the music industry at heart -- record labels or the allegedly villainous P2P service LimeWire -- in the midst of scorched earth litigation that's brimming with intrigue.
In recent months, we've reported that LimeWire, having been found guilty of copyright infringement by a federal judge, has been attempting to battle back some $1 billion in damage claims from record labels. To that end, LimeWire has been insisting that the record companies prove actual damages and produce information on costs such as royalty payments. The file-sharing company, which shut down after a judge's order, has also been creating havoc all over the new media universe, subpoenaing internal documents from Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, Google, MySpace, and a host of other companies. who have vigorously objected to such demands.
The mammoth discovery process is ongoing, and has mostly been conducted under seal, but so far, multiple terabytes of data from e-mails have been collected, and plaintiffs have already turned over a quarter million pages of e-mails, and 22,000 pages of third-party research on the impact of peer-to-peer file sharing on the music industry.
The result so far?
In declarations to the court, LimeWire says the evidence shows that user downloads actually increased record industry revenues and therefore the subsequent shutdown of LimeWire has decreased those revenues. In other words, piracy is good.........
Eriq Gardner can be reached at eriqgardner@yahoo.com and can be followed on Twitter.
Read the full post on the hollywoodreporter.com
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