It appears as though a recent court decision forcing LimeWire to halt its P2P services is having a ripple effect to other parts of the company, as All Things Digital reports the site is closing its online music store at the end of the year and is abandoning its plans for a legal music download service.
The news wasn’t good for LimeWire back in October when a U.S. District Court Judge issued an injunction, forcing the P2P filesharing site to close down both the website and its client. And arguably, things went from bad to worse when a figure named MetaPirate took advantage of the open-source code for the client and recreated a Pirate Edition of LimeWire, causing both the RIAA as well as LimeWire to scramble to track him down. Those meddling kids.
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But according to Peter Kafka, other parts of the company are now closing shop as well. The home page of the LimeWire store announces that it’s no longer accepting customers. And the company has told vendors that the store will close on December 31. Kafka surmises that the company is trying to eliminate some of its remaining assets before the court decides early next year exactly how much it owes the music industry for copyright violations.
The company had long indicated it planned to launch a music subscription service, but those plans now seem unlikely as well. Considering such a project would require licensing agreements with the very businesses that have sought to shut LimeWire down, that’s not really a surprise. Once the world’s most-installed filesharing application, this looks to really be the end of LimeWire.
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