LimeWire’s antitrust countersuit was thrown
out last week after a federal judge granted the RIAA’s motion to dismiss
claims against the company.
Many of the claims were dismissed “without prejudice,” which
would allow LimeWire’s parent company, Lime Group LLC, to file new lawsuits
under state courts.
Lime Group listed a wide variety of complaints against
record labels and the music industry, with the overall theme being that
industry execs conspired against LimeWire and others using a variety of schemes
to undermine P2P and P2P companies’ efforts to legitimate themselves.
Some of these complaints include:
- Claims that RIAA labels banded together to
exclusively support P2P client iMesh and its acoustic fingerprinting technology,
while simultaneously refusing to support a similar hash-based system employed
by LimeWire; when Lime Group sought the necessary hashes to employ their
technology, RIAA refused, instead demanding that LimeWire acquire the rights to
use iMesh’s fingerprinting tech.
- Further, if LimeWire insisted on using its hashing
technology, it would instead have to license a similar hash-based filtering
system from Altnet.
- Music industry joint ventures MusicNet and pressplay
– two services that PC World dubbed “25 Worst Tech Products of all Time” due to
“stunningly
brain-dead features” – were nothing more than conduits for price-fixing and
market manipulation. (pressplay eventually became Napster 2.0 after its 2005
acquisition by Roxio.)
- General claims of “unfair business practices,”
including threatening P2P users with litigation, pressuring artists not to
license works to P2P companies, and false accusing LimeWire of promoting child
pornography and piracy, among other things.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Gerald Lynch wrote that
most of Lime Group’s claims “fail to allege an adverse effect on competition
market-wide.” Additionally, Lynch noted that record labels presented over 100gb
of data totaling 29 million pages worth of information for their defense, while
LimeWire failed to produce “any additional facts it would plead that would
enable it … to demonstrate the existence of a conspiracy.”
Lime Group’s countersuit was filed in response to the RIAA’s lawsuit
against the P2P client, which was launched just days after its $100 million legal
victory over Kazaa.
RIAA executives applauded Lynch’s ruling, noting that Lime Group’s
countersuit was nothing but a diversionary tactic designed to “take attention
away from … [the] massive infringement that is the real focus of this case.”
