Depositions held in Limewire lawsuit
02/17 2008 | 12:03 AM
Posted by: Janko Roettgers
The music industry lawsuit against Limewire has reached its deposition stage, with music industry lawyers deposing current and former Limewire team members. Former Limewire programmer and Last Bamboo co-founder Adam Fisk got questioned Friday.
Fisk is reporting on his blog that he got questioned for hours about more or less irrelevant details of his work at Limewire, only to get nailed by a few quotes he wrote a couple of months ago on the music industry mailing list Pho, that, taken out of context, could be read as an admission of the fact that Limewire was build to facilitate infringement. In his own words:
"They successfully pinned me down on this point with precise “yes” and “no” questions, as in “do you have any reason to think you did not write that statement.” I don’t think LimeWire actively sought to make money from infringing content. I think LimeWire was in large part a victim of its historical time, a time when the Internet was still a baby and when users were not savvy about producing and distributing their own works."
Obviously many users do infringe with Limewire, but that's not what the developers of the application orginally intended, says Fisk:
"When I started working at LimeWire, we were building the Lime Peer Server and planning how Gnutella would be used to search for everything from apartment listings to cars. Despite our best efforts, those plans never came to fruition."
This isn't the first time that discussions from the the Pho mailing list have been used in a file sharing lawsuit. Folks from Napster used to have spirited debates with RIAA representatives on the list back in 1999 - only to find their emails quoted as evidence in the case against the swapping service.
Fisk is reporting on his blog that he got questioned for hours about more or less irrelevant details of his work at Limewire, only to get nailed by a few quotes he wrote a couple of months ago on the music industry mailing list Pho, that, taken out of context, could be read as an admission of the fact that Limewire was build to facilitate infringement. In his own words:
"They successfully pinned me down on this point with precise “yes” and “no” questions, as in “do you have any reason to think you did not write that statement.” I don’t think LimeWire actively sought to make money from infringing content. I think LimeWire was in large part a victim of its historical time, a time when the Internet was still a baby and when users were not savvy about producing and distributing their own works."
Obviously many users do infringe with Limewire, but that's not what the developers of the application orginally intended, says Fisk:
"When I started working at LimeWire, we were building the Lime Peer Server and planning how Gnutella would be used to search for everything from apartment listings to cars. Despite our best efforts, those plans never came to fruition."
This isn't the first time that discussions from the the Pho mailing list have been used in a file sharing lawsuit. Folks from Napster used to have spirited debates with RIAA representatives on the list back in 1999 - only to find their emails quoted as evidence in the case against the swapping service.
Joseph Miller wrote:
http://www.prweb.com/releas...
summary: Limewire has released open source technology that can now block the sharing of all files without a copyright license (although the blocking technology is not currently turned on as default). The http://www.mp3rocket.com founders have agreed, that they will continue the fight for digital freedom and will not block their customer's files and will never filter files based on license detection. The second Limewire technology recently released and adopted by MP3Rocket is improved file filtering technology that blocks "fake files" and spam files from the enemies of files sharing and spammers. The new "TigerTree" hash technology blocks spammer's fake files, such as those containing spam, viruses and Trojans.