The biggest challenge right now is changing the behavior of a generation of internet users to get them to pay for music, said Zeeshan Zaidi, LimeWires 35-year-old chief operating officer.
On May 11, a federal judge ruled that LimeWires users commit a substantial amount of copyright infringement (.pdf) and that the New York company, Lime Group, has not taken meaningful steps to mitigate infringement.
The ruling sets the stage for a potentially massive damage award against the company that could leave it insolvent. Attorneys for Lime Group and the Recording Industry Association of America are expected to return to court next month to haggle over the companys fate.
Zaidi said in a telephone interview that the company wants to convert its 50 million monthly users into paying music customers, and become a player in the paid music-distribution business. For now, the bulk of LimeWires traffic consists of unauthorized copyright material some 93 percent, according to RIAA estimates.
One way to address what the court is talking about, short of shutting down the network, which I think is overreaching and drastic, is to filter the network of these files in question, Zaidi said. This is a way for us to move forward in the case.
Zaidis plan could put LimeWire on roughly the same course followed by Napster after its 2002 courtroom defeat to the RIAA. Roxio purchased the Napster brand and domain name at a bankruptcy auction and attached it to a legitimate music download service, which exists today as an also-ran in a field dominated by Apples iTunes.
Similarly, Swedish entrepreneur Hans Pandeya had dreams of legitimizing the The Pirate Bay, the worlds leading BitTorrent search engine. His plan was to strike licensing deals with content providers and sell movies, music, games and software on the notorious site, but he never managed to pull off the acquisition of The Pirate Bays domain name.
To be sure, moving from the pirate model to the pay-to-play model has many built-in assumptions.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
