LimeWire: Steal this podcast

It's the year 2000, and I have an app to tell you about. It's this one app that you download to your computer, and you can access every song that has ever been recorded anywhere, all without paying a dime. No, to be clear, I'm not talking about Napster. Napster is in the middle of being sued absolutely out of existence. I'm talking about an app called LimeWire. And LimeWire is going to fix what went wrong for Napster. From the Virgin Vox Media, this is Virgin History, a show about the best...

and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. And today, we are talking about the very, very end of FileShare. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need.

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All right, we're back. Let's pirate some stuff. Nila Patel is here. Hello. Sarah John, also here. Hi. Let's just talk about our own experiences here first. We've all pirated a song or two in our day. Were you, where, I feel like there's like, there's like the Napster kids, there's the Kazaa kids, there's the LimeWire kids, and then there's like the kids who don't know. Is that like a fair delineation of the generations, would you say?

No, the kids who don't know are just the Torrent kids. Oh, that's fair. Well, there's the Torrent kids and then there's like the Spotify kids and they're the kids who don't know. But you're right. The Torrent kids belong in there right at the end. Yeah.

But they're still around. I wouldn't discount that. I wouldn't call them kids anymore. But yeah, like the torrent parents at this point, really. Are torrent adults like Disney adults? Like you kind of grow up and a lot of people grow out of it, but you didn't. And that's nice.

Yeah, to be clear, David, I've never pirated anything in my life. But yes, I know quite a lot about all of these programs, like purely academically, of course. Yeah, you study them for journalism. That's beautiful. So what were you? What was your era? My era was Morpheus. It was like soul seek. It was.

I kind of remember LimeWire, but it wasn't really there so much towards the end. And then it was like DC++ was the really big one by the time I hit college. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Neil, it was yours. I'm going to just sound. like an ancient wizard. Well, you're 71 years old. We should just say that right at the top. There's a reasonable case to be made that the entire Verge exists because of software piracy in Napster and LimeWire.

Because that's what radicalized me in college. Like, I am the kid who was a freshman in college writing furious. Like sent to the entire school emails addressed to Greg Jackson, the director of IT services about traffic shaping the network. So we couldn't run Napster. That was me. I feel bad for director Jackson. I don't know what I don't know what's become of him, but he received a lot of emails from me. And that's it just sent me to law school because I was fully righteous about it.

I didn't know what I was doing in those emails. I want to be clear. I was just citing case law that I had no idea even what was happening. And then I ended up at the end of all that. uh working in a tiny law firm in chicago defending college kids who were getting sued by the recording industry for using kazakh okay and that was so soul crushing that i turned to blogging but you were so you were a you were a baby lawyer

in the Kazaa universe. Yeah. Okay. Wow, that's old. You're old. It's not great. It's not a, it's like now it's, at a time it was very cool and like that. I had a tip job. And now it's like, oh, you're like, are you OK? How did you do that? Let's talk about statins, Dr. Patel. Like, it's bad. Were you, Sarah, just were you like.

You were studying some of the other side of this stuff while you were also pirating like a maniac. I mean, part of why I went to law school is the same reason as Neil. I was like. This was also a radicalizing moment for me. I was like, this doesn't make any sense. The internet is infinitely replicable. Information is now infinitely replicable. Why is it that we're sort of stuck in... Why are we...

bogged down by copyright law. This doesn't make any sense to me. And then I went to school. I studied a whole bunch of shit, including copyright. And then I came out of it for various reasons, a broken person. And now I'm in digital media. It's not great. It's a real similar, it's a real similar trajectory.

My radicalizing moment was not defending kids with Kazat, but there was definitely, there was a lawsuit I saw where I was just like, I don't like this. I don't like any of this. It's a long story. you about that lawsuit another time okay but like yeah there's like it is when you see sort of how uh copyright especially when you see the law interact with technology and you interact with the internet there's like a story about humanity to be told there that like yeah

The sort of for a certain kind of brain, the obvious pivot is journalism. So, OK, so let's let's like anchor ourselves in time here a little bit, because the Limewire story sort of starts in 2000, which is if I'm doing. My timeline math correctly here is while the Napster fight is ongoing, right? Is it like we're still in the middle of sort of the first version of this fight? Napster was 98?

97, 98, something like that. In there, 99. Yeah, I think like one of the seminal cases is 99. Like, yeah, one of the decisions comes down in 99. Yeah, so Napster goes away, basically, loses this thing, goes away. Yeah, I mean, fair. Yeah, Napster never really went away, but it stopped being Napster. And then in its wake come just a million other services. Again, with names like the ones you mentioned, we get...

you know, the Kazaz of the world and Morpheus and like a hundred others that I had forgotten that I used every single one of is a thing that I discovered. I've used all of these services at one point or another, all to download like Backstreet Boys songs.

That's neither here nor there. But so LimeWire ended up being like by a mile the most popular of them, which I did not realize until researching for this episode. But anyway, so back to the beginning. The story starts in 2000 with this guy named Mark Gorton.

who is a Wall Street guy. He ran a hedge fund. He was a high-speed trading guy. He ran a thing called, I think it was called the Lime Brokerage that was doing high-speed trading. And then when Napster goes away, pivots to file sharing, which is odd. But he's like not a music guy. He's a Wall Street guy. He's a hedge fund dude. At the same time, he's also working on like open source government software. He's a big advocate for more bike lanes in New York City.

Sure, big ups to Mark. Ended up having a weird dalliance with RFK later. Like, we don't need to talk about Mark Gordon too much. When you say dalliance. Wait. Romantic. Like, were they sending each other text messages? They were not sending each other text messages. Yeah, we're going to cut that out. that one's just for us i mean i censored myself

He raised some money for RFK. We don't need to talk too much about Mark Gordon. There was LimeWire, which was a file sharing service. It looked like all the other file sharing services. It was for file sharing. But at the very beginning, he also had this idea about this thing called LimeWire Pro.

And their big idea was you could pay $22 every six months for like a nebulous set of extra features. They said it was like better search results. You'd get faster downloads. And the pitch was like, we are going to. legitimize this project and make some money off of it. You don't see why the high-speed trading guy was drawn to file sharing? No, connect that for me. I mean...

All Wall Street is is buying low and selling high and then treating things like commodities and saying, I will take this for free and sell it for some money and make the exchange. I mean, if you just look at it that way, right? I'm going to take this stuff that's free. And then at some level, every transaction, I will take a cut. And if I can be the one to move it around, that's there's some value. Yeah.

It kind of makes sense. There was a moment. I think it's important to remember at this time, the music industry was riding as high as it has ever ridden in history. It was just making more money than ever, than maybe it ever will again. But then it ever hadn't passed. The CD was out, you know, it's like all these huge bands were just being like created. There's that one guy in Orlando that was just like, I make boy bands. And he just like manufactured them all in absolute cultural dominance.

And so taking from them did not feel bad in a way that Spotify's relationships with artists today feels bad. Yeah, I think this is the original Wall Street bets to Dogecoin pivot, right? Like where it's like, yeah, yeah, this is that. That's sort of... There is... a weird analogy between the financial system and file sharing like it's very yeah yeah if i can just peel off some pennies on the back of this machine i'll be rich and you'll be fine is it's right there did that feeling

increase after Napster, this sense of like the music industry and the RAA is like the big bad guy that we screw them, we can steal it. Right, right. Like they just did the worst thing they could do. They were successful. But they were like, yeah, we're the bad guys. Yeah, I actually like disagree with you about that narrative. I mean, yes, they turned into the bad guys for a certain segment, like for you, for me, like for.

a certain generation and then like there's a cutoff where suddenly people like oh yeah I feel kind of bad about stealing from artists it's like it actually I think the propaganda worked like I think it worked I think that we all talk about file sharing now as though it's a bad thing and we know it's a bad thing. I think that the RIAA succeeded in turning file sharing into something that you're not supposed to admit you do.

So you mean even in the sense that as you're sitting there doing it, you sort of know you're doing something you shouldn't? It's like you're smoking weed at the back of your church parking lot or whatever, right? And that's what makes it cool. Right. That's what makes it cool, but it's also something you hide. It's something you hide even though you know everyone does it. And before then...

Everyone's doing it. People were just doing it. And you didn't care. You didn't care about talking about it. I don't know. If you look up what were the most popular file sharing programs on Reddit, you'll see a thread from two years ago where... the very top response is, nice try, FBI. And I don't think that we'd be talking about that in 2000 or whatever. We'd just be like, oh, yeah.

I like I make mixtapes for my girlfriend. Like, right. Right. Well, I think this is this is part of why I find LimeWire so interesting is like from the very beginning, I think they are trying to figure out a way to kind of have their cake and eat it, too, on that front where they're like, OK, we understand.

what peer to peer file sharing is used for. And it's certainly true that there are lots of things you can do on a service like this that aren't share music, but that's what everybody does. So they come up with this idea. I found this great quote. from a New York Times story in 2010, where he's sort of reminiscing at the end of LimeWire about LimeWire. And he says, this is just a line from the story.

Back in 2000, when Mr. Gorton jumped into the peer-to-peer network business with LimeWire, he envisioned it growing into a popular service for commerce, he said. Users could search the network for a new television set, for example, and get results from retailers across the country. Like, hey, what? How? He's just describing the internet. It doesn't make any sense. But again, there is this clear idea here that if we can figure out how to make this thing a business, it will...

sort of definitionally be legitimate. And I just find that so fascinating. And he's like, we can do all of this stuff on top of piracy. But as long as we do it in a way that feels legitimate and upstanding and makes everybody money, A, I'm going to get rich and B, people are going to take it seriously. And it almost worked. And it's just so fascinating. So anyway, it's a Java app.

that you had to have a separate installer for. It was a mess. This app was not great, but it was better than everything else. This is my main memory of LimeWire. We came out of... Napster and we came out of Kazaa and then all of a sudden there were like nice looking file sharing apps for the first time ever and they weren't good but they didn't have a million ads or at least you know they had half a million ads instead of a million ads.

They were a little faster. They were a little easier to use. And it looked like a designer had looked at it, which no one would ever say that about that first run of file sharing apps. I recall Napster being very clean.

It was very straightforward, but it was very it was like a file system. Like it just didn't. Which is all I wanted. I just wanted to look at your file system and take the music that you. And for that, like it worked fine. But I think we're also at the point now where like this stuff is so.

unbelievably mainstream, like everyone is doing it. But I found a stat that said at some point, I've seen numbers between 16% and 18% of computers ran LimeWire at one point. Like that's, that's there. It was, it was. everywhere and a lot of that is because like a lot of people had computers were like college students who were pirating music and like but still it was like this stuff was so unbelievably mainstream that they were starting to think about it like properly as a product

But also, our buddy Mark Gordon did a bunch of deeply shady stuff to try and make money. For a long time, for I think like four or five years, if you downloaded LimeWire, you also downloaded an app called LimeShop. And Lime Shop was one of those things that would... monitor your online purchases and insert itself as the affiliate code and just steal the money for LimeWire. It's just straight up like there was the big honey scandal with all the creators.

It was just that two decades earlier. Truly a pioneer. Seriously. And it was like this. They just straight up installed official spyware on your computer every time you downloaded it. And if you uninstalled LimeWire. You didn't uninstall Lime Shop. Nila, you sent me a CNET review.

right before we started recording this of, I think it was called LimeWire Basic, which came out a few years later. And one of the things they're very happy about is that when you uninstall LimeWire, only 15 megabytes of stuff is left on your computer, which just says something about what we expect.

It's also wild, right? We're talking at a point in time when the mainstream tech websites and publications are like, we will review a file sharing app. Yeah. No one today is reviewing BitTorrent clients. It's just not happening that way anymore. We should start. We should. But yeah, it was like, this stuff was, this was the good version of this. Like, which to some extent, like the bar was so low. Yeah. I want to point out that in particular for Mac users.

But also just as a whole product, LimeWire was junk. Like top to bottom junk. Oh, yeah. They didn't even invent the underlying protocol. They were hijacking an open source protocol called Nutella, which was spelled with a G-N-U. Because that's the name of the license. And so it's called Nutella. And they ran on this open protocol and the app was like a garbage Java app that ran like dog shit on basically every computer. But it looked nice.

It didn't. This is the time for Mac users when apps that don't look like Mac apps are just not allowed. There's religious fervor about Mac apps looking like Mac apps. on you know an os or aqua whatever it's called when the imac came out they changed all the buttons like there's just a lot of religious fervor and this thing was just like this garbage java app that ran so slow based on a protocol that anyone could build a client for. And it installed a bunch of spyware on your computer.

And then somehow the bar was so low that it became the success. Yeah, this was like a huge improvement because it wasn't like Kazaa, which would just open 100,000 ads on your computer every time you did anything. And so I think I was thinking about. This again, like in the context of like me all these years ago thinking about this stuff. And I remember there was this long running worry that people had about like, oh, you're going to download.

corrupted file if you go through LimeWire or whatever, and it's going to take over your computer and cause you all kinds of trouble. And there was a bunch of that, and I have some fun examples of that that happened. But also just downloading the app was the spyware. It's like I wonder how many people started being bombarded with apps and being like, oh, I must have downloaded a bad music file. And it's like, no, you just downloaded Kazaha. You did that to yourself from the very beginning here.

But this is the state of things like there was there was a bunch of shady stuff going on and all these companies were like desperately trying to figure out how to make money. And what I've been trying to figure out this whole time, and I still don't have a great answer is if. If you're Mark Gordon and you're in the year 2000, are you thinking either I can do this properly and make it huge?

Or are you thinking like there is a limit here? This is a hugely mainstream activity that is going to be absolutely adjudicated out of existence. And I'm just going to get while the getting is good. And I would say everything about.

And LimeWire suggests that that's how he felt about it, that he was just like, there's some money in this and I'm going to get it while I can. But everything he said about the product was like, I have a long roadmap for this. Peer-to-peer doesn't have to be bad. There's a lot we can do. I have big ideas for LimeWire.

It's like, I would just I would love to get Mark drunk and ask him, like, did you really think this was actually going to work? But for a while, it did work. Like as late as 2006, the biggest numbers I saw that came up in some of the court filings. where that it was making $20 million a year, which is not earth shattering amounts of money, but it's for a file sharing service. It's not nothing like that. You can run a business on $20 million a year.

Especially when the open source community is writing the underlying protocol that makes your thing go. And when you're still running your hedge fund on the side. As a side project for Mark Gordon, it's a pretty good one. So this chugs along for a while. And then in...

Like right in the middle of LimeWire's ascent, the Groxer court case happens. So just to give you guys a sense of like the feelings at the time. We made a montage of some of the coverage of the Grokster case in 2005. Let me just play this for you. It's called Grokster. Not a nice name. And it's a name that's not liked by big media. And they're trying to shut that one down, too. That case is going to the Supreme Court.

tech millionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is throwing both his hat and his wallet into the ring with Grokster. Cuban says if the entertainment industry wins its lawsuit, then it's like saying people don't steal content, software does. which is ridiculous, right? People from all over the country on both sides of this issue, the movie business, the recording industry, the high-tech business.

filled the courtroom the line that stretched out the door early this morning people waiting to get in this obviously is a very significant case the internet file sharing service grokster agreed to shut down today its software was widely used to copy music and Like, I feel like if you want to pick the end of file sharing.

It's this. Yes, it is. It is. That is the end of file sharing. It is the the birth of copyright law as we know it today through sort of series of other things. But essentially, you're looking at. In the 80s, there was a case that went to the Supreme Court about Betamax. It was about essentially taping things on VHS, whether or not...

you could hold the VCR manufacturers liable for the fact that people were definitely, definitely infringing copyright by taping stuff on their home VCRs, right? And what you got out of that was the Supreme Court said, no, we're not going to hold Sony liable because, yes, people are probably infringing, but this technology is also capable of substantial non-infringing uses. People are also using their VCRs for stuff that...

isn't copyright infringement. And you shouldn't make an entire technology illegal just because people are also infringing copyright sometimes, right? And so, OK, this is the thing I've always wondered about this case and have never had occasion to ask you before. In the Betamax case, I forget the number they came up with, some like single digit percentage that they were like.

They're using this is the number of people who are using it for non illegal activities. Yeah, it's like it's it's a really small portion. So like it's that's in the footnotes. So there's no rule where they go. Oh, if you get 10 percent. non-infringing uses you're all good okay there's no there's no legal rule but in the footnotes there's a strong implication that if you can get 10

You'll be your gravy. You're good. And that's 10 percent doing good things. Yes. Even if 90 percent of people. Yes. Are using your thing to record SNL. Right. So like so one of the one of the things that they were talking about actually in the. decision was like, oh, so sometimes people just can't watch the sports game when it happens. They would have, but they couldn't get to their TV literally in front, like in front of their TV. So surely it's okay to record it.

and then watch it later. And that's known as time shifting. So it's not like they're recording Gone with the Wind and then watching Gone with the Wind over and over again, which that would be, oh, that looks like piracy, right? So it's like, oh, yeah, 10 percent of the time people are watching the sports game like a few hours after it aired. And surely you don't want to make an entire technology illegal.

when it's capable of doing that. So we're looking at that case, right? I just want to point out, by the way, empires have risen and fallen on the back of substantial non-infringing uses. Yeah. Like the whole tech industry. is built around what on earth does substantial non-infringing uses mean? And this number, the idea that you're pointing at a number, is like everyone wants it to be simple. And empires have risen and fall on the fact that it's not simple. Right.

It's not simple. And also what happens is that with Grokster, that's the end. That's the end of substantial non-infringing uses. So, yeah. So what happens with Grokster is that so you had the substantial non-infringing uses thing. And the idea with that. is there's a difference between being the pirate and being the person who enables the pirate, right? The person who makes the Xerox machine, the corporation that makes the VCRs. And there's always been sort of this thing where like...

yeah, maybe you didn't do the bad job. In the copyright context, there was a very, we knew what that range of actions or forms of participation were. And then you get to the file sharing era. And when you get to the file sharing area, you're talking about peer-to-peer. So not Napster, but the later iterations you're looking at, it's all the kids, their computers are talking to other people's computers.

Meanwhile, the people who are making the software, they're like, we're just making software. We're not hosting anything. We're not doing anything. Why are we being held liable? By the way. We're running these studies that say that 30% of what's being shared is like, I don't know, like educational materials, like stuff that there was no rights holder attached. So surely substantial non-infringing uses.

And what you get is it goes to the Supreme Court and Supreme Court goes, well, don't love this. Right. And and what they do is they make up a new doctrine of copyright law. So they make up a doctrine. It's called inducement. Okay. And essentially the idea is, okay, sure, yeah, you didn't host anything. But you were like, come here. Come here, kid. And the examples that they give are kind of wild. You're the stranger opening the door to the van.

can be kind of vague a little bit in some ways. So it's like the fact that they were billing themselves as a certain kind of service or like even the fact that like Grokster, like the name is Stir, right? like in the name, like, or that they have like a... Can I just pause there for one second? Yes. The Supreme Court was like, there's a stir in the name and that makes people think of Napster. You did it. Like, it was... That's in there. It's like OpenNap was like one of the...

services had a thing like a sub spin out thing called open nap. And then there were like, there were like they, the way that they advertise their services to people or the fact that like certain keywords would prompt like people to. to find this application, right? Those were the things that they were pulling together. And it's like, yes, people did understand that this was Napster's successor. But there was no legal theory that said...

you look kind of like Napster, ergo you're illegal. This was new. It is true that this hues to the facts of what was happening at the time. But to make law out of that... It's very strange. It's a very, very strange outcome. And I think importantly what happens is that substantial non-infringing uses goes away as a standard. Well, it's still technically the law.

But it's really hard to rely on now. Like, people just don't do it. Because even if there are substantial non-infringing uses, but I'm kind of wink-winking at you to do the bad stuff, it doesn't matter anymore. It's like, yeah. If your business is taking something for zero dollars and then trying to make some dollars, they're going to be like, yeah, it's inducement. Got it. Right. Does it look like this thing that we obviously know is bad? Are you taking stuff for free? And it's...

here we are in the AI era. Yeah. And where there's like infinity lawsuits about this. And like, this is, there's a world in which meta and open AI and whoever else shows up in court and is like substantial on infringing uses. And then there's a world in which, hey, you're basically helping people steal. If not having stolen yourself. And probably definitely having stolen yourself in this case of some of these companies. Okay. And substantial non-infringing uses if you think about it.

in this period when it's happening, like you're seeing sort of the birth of Web 2.0, right? You can see how important it's about to become where it's like, oh, YouTube. Like, yeah, I'm putting up videos that... don't have any copyright attached except for maybe mine. And then also, people are putting up music videos that are owned by various record labels or whatever. Should all of YouTube become illegal?

Based on that, like, right, like, so every single website is dealing with the substantial non-infringing uses problem. As soon as substantial non-infringing uses stops being a reliable standard, then people start going, oh, wait a second. There's this law called the DMCA passed in 1999. And people, when it did, people were like, oh, this is like, you know, this is a real mixed bag of a law. But it really comes to prominence after Grokster, where this one legal standard.

No longer something that people feel comfortable with. They go, all right, we're going to go to DMCA Safe Harbor. Now we're going to go hide behind Safe Harbor. We're going to set up our DMCA agents, notice and takedown regime. And that's when Web 2.0 looks like.

what it looks like now got it okay that's really interesting and this actually this all gives me way more context for something i read right after all this happened uh there was a great the new york times had a big story right after grokster was decided It was the day after. And they actually called Mark Gorton at LimeWire and asked him how he felt. And he was super spooked by this whole thing.

And his quote was, some people are saying that as long as I don't actively induce infringement, I'm OK. I don't think it'll work out that way. And he said the court handed a tool to judges that they can declare inducement whenever they want to. So this is like 2005 dude is spooked. And I think there's a there's a real turn here for LimeWire that I think is really interesting because I think they started at this moment where if I'm understanding all of this correctly.

The fact that the Grokstar case even got to the Supreme Court was sort of surprising because a lot of this had like things kind of came and went before they sort of had huge overarching world shaping decisions made about them. And so I think. Again, if I'm psychoanalyzing our man Mark here, there's this sense of like, okay, I can tweak the formula and I can make it work. Like I'm not going to make the Napster mistake of hosting an index of all of the stuff available on my...

I'm going to I'm going to treat it differently. I'm going to treat it like a business. We're going to be a little more legit and it's going to be fine. And then this happens and he goes, oh, maybe this whole thing was just a house of cards and now it is falling down. Yeah, I think there's this. This really worrisome thing happening where if you look at the Grokstra oral arguments, actually, people keep bringing up the iPod.

And there is like this implicit understanding that the iPod is OK because it's an example of an American company making good. Right. Like it's like it is very much you can hear the assumption in people's voices like, oh, yeah. iPod's legal, but what makes the iPod different from this? Because you don't want to make the iPod illegal. When just the sheer hard drive space indicates that this is for people with gigantic music libraries, where do you get a gigantic music library?

Nobody has the money for that. And yeah, so like this thing that this Wall Street bro is trying to do where he's like piggybacking off of the piracy. wave into something legitimate. Arguably, if you sort of close one eye and look kind of blurry at the picture, you're like, oh yeah, iTunes is kind of that, right? But even Napster thought that it was going to sort of...

do the pivot and make deals with the record labels. Everyone thought that they were going to eventually go legitimate and monetize and so on and so forth, which is, of course, what we're hearing now from the AI companies. It's like, infringe copyright now and then make the deal.

later um and so pretty quickly yeah limewire starts to do basically exactly that actually can i offer you just a quote of how the content industry was thinking during this whole time. Because inducement is very important in the content industry. They do not like substantial non-infringing uses. In other countries around the world, they have actually put taxes on blank media.

So if you went and bought a blank cassette tape or a blank CDR, the music industry would get paid because they were like, people are going to use that for piracy. Just the act of buying blank media should offer us a cut. The music industry went to war with Apple trying to get a cut of every iPod. And they got that cut from Microsoft, which resulted in no money. But they got that cut. So the content industry just has this very clear view that, like, this is our money.

And if you mess with the money, you need to give us some of it. And so I just, here's this quote and I'm going to, it's years and years later and it's going to sound bananas to this audience. Okay. So there's, while this is all happening, there's.

Basically, the same litigation is happening around TiVo in digital PVRs. Oh, sure. Personal video recorders. More or less the same reason. Right. It's a VCR, but now there's a hard drive in it. We're going to relitigate the whole thing because the technology is different. And there's one comes out. It's called the Sonic Blue 4000. And it can automatically skip the ads. It can detect the ads. And as you watch the content, it can skip them. So here's a quote.

from Jamie Kellner, who at the time is the chairman and CEO of the Turner Broadcasting Division of AOL Time Warner. Okay. Famous success, Turner Broadcasting Division of AOL Time Warner. Here's a quote. These are Jamie Kellner. He says this in 2002. Skipping commercials is theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise, you couldn't get the show on an ad supported basis.

Anytime you skip a commercial, you're actually stealing the programming. Good Lord. Like, just go to any young Verge reader today and be like, is skipping commercials theft? And they'd be like, no, like, absolutely not. But at the time, this was all one product that all these companies were selling. And so these new computery things that could take the content and play them back in different ways or get the content from biases because hard drives are so big.

It was like you were getting in the car and being like, go up. And they were just like, my brain doesn't work that way. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. Stealing the commercials is obviously theft. And this is the disconnect that inducement solves.

So to that point, actually, let me just play you a montage we made of some of the chatter around all things music piracy at the time, because the vibes are all over the place. We have South Park and then a bunch of very serious RIAA people. me just play you this montage you think downloading music for free is not a big deal downloading films is stealing If you do it, you will face the consequences. Downloading is the only way to go. And the best thing about it, it's free. Downloading free.

Not likely. They're egregious uploaders sharing music on the Internet in the range of 800 songs per person. Joe Tenenbaum fighting a $675,000 fine. for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs. The Supreme Court refusing his appeal. This became such a joke that it ended up on South Park.

But also people are like dead serious about it. All right, we need to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about the many, many, many lawsuits that also came for LimeWire. We'll be right back.

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That's O-D-O-O dot com. All right, we're back. So I want to get into LimeWire dying, which happens very quickly here. But a couple of other interesting things are happening along the way here. First of all, LimeWire keeps doing new stuff. It started supporting BitTorrent in 2004.

BitTorrent is starting to become a thing. LimeWire really wants to do this. It also launched a messaging app. This was a thing in file sharing for a while. Everything app. Yeah. It was like, this is a way to send illegal music files directly to your friend. So it's like it really is pushing towards this idea of wanting to be more than just a piracy app, even though it is mostly a piracy app. It's also.

trying to figure out if there is a way to make all of this work a little better. Right after Grokster, they started thinking, okay, maybe we'll ban people from sharing. licensed files. We'll just remove all of that stuff from the platform. And it pisses off a bunch of its contributors so much that they leave and create Frostwire, which is another pretty successful file sharing app, basically like pirated out of LimeWire.

Because they were like, no, we don't want to go legit. We want to download music. So all of this is happening simultaneously. And then a bunch of lawsuits come for LimeWire. Kind of two at once. There's one from Arista Records, which sues LimeWire. But the big one is the RAAA, which is its real sort of first huge swing since Grokster comes at LimeWire.

And a thing I'm realizing now as I go back over this, it was all inducement. Like a huge part of this lawsuit came down to, ironically, LimeWire's website, which when you went to LimeWire.com. One of the things that it said was like not it didn't quite say come here to download.

illegal music for free but it basically did and it talked about it talked about the search it talked about the download speeds it talked about all the the sorting by genre all the stuff you could find all the music you could find everything that was available and it was like it was right

Right on the edge of being like a library full of illegal music for you to download. And which is funny because on the one hand, it's like, well, you obviously didn't learn anything from what you're doing here with Grokster. But it was like.

really, really on the edge of inducement. There's a trend here that, again, plays out over and over again. There's a law. And then a bunch of tech companies come up with a technical solution to the law. So Napster is illegal because Napster owns a central index of all the files in the network, even though the transfers are peer-to-peer. And then they go out of business because of a lawsuit. And the tech industry, which doesn't look like the tech industry of today.

It looks like a bunch of people just starting companies, but like a bunch of tech people are like, okay, the law said you can't do that. What if we decentralize the index and make the protocol open source and call it Nutella for some reason? And then Grokster, or LimeWire is built on the back of this. Grokster had a different solution to the Napster problem, right? And Grokster goes up and the rule is you can't do inducement.

And so what you're seeing of LimeWire being right on the edge is yet another solution to the problem. How far can we go before its inducement? And the only thing that they did was they calibrated wrong. Yeah. Right? And so they get caught because they went too far. And this game never works. At the end of the day, the rights holders, the United States of America, are entirely too powerful.

And they will be like, no, you're just telling people to steal our stuff. And the courts now have this tool. It's like, yep, you sure are. And there's like nothing, there's no rational standard underneath that beyond, yep, it sure looks like that. I mean, judges also really hate when defendants are smug, right? Like that's the thing where they go, because it's like, because.

The defendant's sitting there going, what did I do? Didn't I do it right? And then, yeah, the judge is going to be like, no, this is too cute. What do you think I am, an idiot? Like, no. And then often the tech industry is like, yes. Yeah. Right. And then there's all these quotes from this time that are just people like the law is can't keep up with the tech industry. And the judge is like, no, but your website's like, do you like stealing stuff? Yeah.

It's not that hard to figure out what you're doing. But there is one other turn in this that I think is really interesting. And I want you guys to explain this to me. So one of the things that came up in this ruling, which is a district court in Manhattan.

So going all the way back to the Grokster thing, right? So they decide to try and figure out if there's a way to do this in a more legal way. And one of the things that LimeWire does is reach out to a bunch of record labels to get... basically like catalog metadata in order to figure out if they can build a filter against that catalog that would block all of these licensed songs from being.

shared on the service, right? Try to figure out an automated way essentially to be like, oh, I know what song that is and that can't be shared. One of the things They were hoping to do then was strike deals with all the record labels to make a paid service. Right. You can sort of see the turn there. Right. We're going to make it illegal.

to share the stuff that people are sharing, and then we're going to make them pay to do it. And that's sort of the two turns he had been planning for a while, but I think that all gets accelerated after Grokster. But then the judge in this case said that... Because that was the plan and because they were developing this filter, it actually supported the RAA's argument that he and they knew that a huge part of LimeWire was to trade.

and share illegal files. And so just by virtue of the fact that you're trying to solve this problem, you are acknowledging it as a problem and thus your service is illegal. I would characterize that differently. Okay. I think if you take a hostage. and then demand a ransom, you are probably liable for kidnapping. You probably have a hostage, yeah. Like that is a totally bad faith negotiation. Okay. Right? We have created the greatest threat to your business that has ever existed. Sure.

We would like to legitimize it. Pray I don't alter it further. What are you talking about? And then just to contextualize the music industry, the bottom has fallen out of the music industry by this point. Right? Like ringtones are the great hope of the music industry at this moment in time. The crazy frog is going to save the music industry. Not iTunes downloads yet.

So people have just stopped buying music. They've stopped buying CDs, which were hugely profitable. They're not buying $1 a song iTunes purchases at the... volume necessary to replace all that revenue. And we're like, here's what we're going to do. AT&T is going to sell Crazy Frog for $1,000 per phone. It was like, what is going on? So the music industry is now in dead panic.

And they were looking at this hostage negotiation and being like, absolutely not. Fair. I mean, when you put it like that. And so I'm surprised the RAA would agree with you. At the end of this. Who have I become? Right. Somehow Palpatine has returned. You're a real monster. And I think, Sarah, this also goes to your point. One of the things, let me just read you a quote. This is from Mitch Bainwall, who's the RIA.

CEO at the time. He thought his cleverness, he's talking about Mark Gordon, he thought with his cleverness that he could get away with it. He's the Bernie Madoff of internet crime, which is very good. He was thumbing his nose at the rule of law to profiteer enormously. And so I think it is there is something to the like this guy is.

This is all obviously bad faith. And that's what the record label said to over and over. Like they reach out and they're like, oh, would you like to make a deal? And they're like, why on earth? No, we would like you to die. And then there's just the frost wire problem. Yeah, sure. You can maybe you can make a deal with.

with Gorton and LimeWire. And now it costs 10 bucks a month to use LimeWire and we've created proto-Spotify. But it turns out that everyone is still doing piracy. And what we need to do is kill that to create these new business models. Yeah. So all of this goes for a while. And in 2010.

The RA, by the way, went after $72 trillion worth of damages in this case. Yeah, it's like, what is it, greater than the entire world's GDP or something like that? Which is very good. I really appreciate that from LimeWire.

wins this case in 2010, wins an injunction, and it essentially, this is the end of LimeWire. It takes a minute for it to properly- Wait, losing $72 trillion in damages? Who would have thought they didn't come back? So I will say, they end up settling- For $105 million, which I would argue from from.

If I'm starting with nothing and you're starting with $72 trillion and we landed $105 million, I feel like I won that negotiation. We're much closer to my number than your number. This is the worst game of Price is Right ever played. Yeah, my bid is 72 trillion dollars. I'm going to go on the high side. I'm going to win the showcase showdown every time. One dollar. Let's do this. Which, like...

By the way, that is another wild thing about copyright law is the statutory damages. Like the numbers you see are like just they don't make any sense because they're tuned to a different reality. Yeah. Right. So it's like it's. You're looking at minimum, maximum statutory damages. For non-willful, you're looking at $750,000 to $30,000 per infringement.

And then for willful, so like when you do a really bad job, it goes all the way up to $150,000 per infringement. This makes sense in a society where infringing is like, I don't know, you're pressing a bootleg record. This makes no sense in a society where you are downloading hundreds of songs, right? Like in your little college dormitory. And definitely makes no sense in a society where you released software.

Millions of songs are getting like getting passed back and forth. So, yeah, this is where you're getting greater than the whole world's GDP. Yeah. Yeah. This copyright law is maybe the only law that. gets this weird, gets this absolutely wild. And it's the only law that functionally regulates the internet. Yeah. It's super cool. The one we just keep doing. By the way, on the damages front, you know it doesn't make sense because the RIAA ran an entire program.

to stop kids from doing it at $5,000 a settlement. Not $72 trillion. And all those kids were downloading thousands of songs, right? I mean, Mark ran a hedge fund. He had money. So, you know, you got to... 72Ts. It's the equivalent of... His money to $72 trillion was me to five grand in college. I mean, just a loaded gun, right? It's like it is you will pay whatever you can because we have this other gigantic number that we've calculated through.

this cudgel of a law. And we will like, yeah, like you bring, they bring a machine gun to every negotiation, the $72 trillion machine gun. Yeah, as copyright, it will radicalize you.

Yeah, seriously. So yeah, so fall of 2010, there's an injunction against LimeWire. They do the damages trial in early 2011. And by fall of 2011, LimeWire's dead. And it was like through this whole process, it was kind of starting to die. I think a lot of people sort of saw the writing on the wall and were seeing these lawsuits. And I think the like the chilling effect of those $5,000 lawsuits was very real. Like it took a while.

But it worked like I think the PR campaign that that essentially was, I think, was as successful as any of these other moves. Right. At least that's how I remember it. Well, I mean, other things started to happen, right? So the iTunes store existed. Steve Jobs famously did not want DRM on music for a whole variety of reasons. That led to a very different kind of file sharing.

Because people had iPods. You could plug the iPods into your friend's computer. You could get the songs that way. This is all happening outside. Spotify launches 2006. Spotify launched in 2006 because the music industry in Europe was at zero. Right. Talk about negotiating in a hostage situation. it was dead it was just gone and i all of those labels in europe were like we have a lot of reasons to try something new

Because no one's going to buy it. Piracy is rampant in Europe, particularly in Sweden. I think there are laws protecting pirates in Sweden in a way that hadn't really happened here. So like it was just a different, like the pirate bay, the torrent site still operates in Sweden. So Spotify just had this incentive to create this new structure and it didn't come here for a while because the labels thought they could go back in time. Right. And that.

All of this is happening sort of in the background of LimeWire, just meeting its final fate. Yeah, LimeWire did, to its credit, at one point, launch a music store. It had no music anyone wanted to listen to in it, but it existed. But the biggest thing that happened in 2011 is that Spotify launched in the U.S. And that's when it all just flipped. Because it's like, that was the... time all of a sudden, and I remember having these conversations where it was like,

All of a sudden you could just listen to all the music that you wanted. Yeah. And then Spotify was just the game. Yeah. It was like the whole you have to be easier than piracy thing was like it finally was. It was just true. It turned out to be true. Like, which I don't know. I mean, there's a whole set of arguments to be made about whether or not Spotify costs the right amount of money, whether they're paying artists enough.

But like the sort of basic contention of people wanted to listen to music on their devices and like not be tied down to records, CDs or their computers. They just wanted something a little more portable. It turned out to be true. Yeah. So, okay, so two codas to the LimeWire story, and then we're going to move on and do the version history questions here. LimeWire.

has been through a bunch of weird lives for a while. It was like a couple of LimeWire employees bought the domain name and redirected it to a different file sharing service for a while, which I thought was very funny. More recently, it was revived as an NFT project, which is gross and also feels right. It's exactly right. Yeah, it is. But then I looked at the website today.

And it is it's a file sharing website. If you go to Limewire.com, it just looks like WeTransfer, which is very weird. But it is also a crypto token. Also perfect. But the reason I find this company fascinating, the reason I want to talk about it is it. really does feel like there's a certain version of this story that I think starts with Napster. And I think it ends with LimeWire. Like it is the last one.

to be sort of sued out of insane existence by the RAA in this way, such that it ended right at the moment this other version of the music industry is starting to appear. And we just kind of never looked back. I mean, I agree with that. I don't think that those things are independent of each other. Okay. Napster and LimeWire destroyed a version of the music industry. It just brought it to an end. Yeah.

Like the music industry is riding high. They're like, would you like another Britney Spears? We've manufactured one in Orlando. And they just did. They were just able to do it. MTV was a dominant cultural force. So much money was. was in a monoculture of music. There was just a vast array of artists who were making medium good livings in a way that kind of doesn't exist now. Artists were able to do things like claim they weren't going to sell out.

Because they were just making enough money. And now it's like every artist already has a brand integration in their first single. That's weird. But it's because the music has been totally devalued by all of the systems that came after Napster. And so there was a moment when what people were buying was music. There was a moment when there was just like economic value attributed to a song. And these companies just took that to zero. Yeah.

Now these songs are worth zero because you can get them for free. And the music industry had to basically recreate a business model. And a lot of that business model is like... Yep, we're going to give you 0.0015 limelight tokens per listen or whatever it is to the artists. And the artists are going to figure out that they have to basically live on tour.

And they have to write the songs in hotel rooms. The songs are going to be really, really short so you get more listens. We're going to do brand integrations all day and all night because that's where the revenue is going to be. And something very big changed in the culture when you took the value of a song to zero dollars. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And it is like we spent then like a decade of breaking it.

And then the next decade was rebuilding it again in a totally different image. I like, okay, I'm actually going to challenge that. Yeah. I don't think it was these companies. I mean, like, yes, these companies made money off of it. But I think that this technology would have existed regardless. I think that the peer-to-peer, like, I mean, Nutella, Nutella, I don't know. I think that all of that stuff was going to get written. I think all of it was going to get distributed.

And I think that the piracy was going to happen. And we see the massive amounts of piracy coming through these programs like LimeWire, built by Wall Street Bros, who are taking a cut off of... the piracy it's because like the interface is a bit slicker a bit nicer than than uh whatever you're going to spin up through open source means or whatever right um but i think that if you

strip all of the capitalism out of it this big technological shift was going to kill music it was just going to kill the music industry and yeah like there is this thing where you like step back and go was that necessarily a good thing? Maybe not, but I think that it was going to happen. I think that it was going to happen.

And at least the RIAA got their little cut of what would have been $72 trillion if only they had made $72 trillion. Yeah. I mean, you just wonder if they would have built more. They wouldn't have. They wouldn't have. But the systems we saw show up in other countries where your internet access came with a content fee that was paid to the culture companies, right? That was paid to Hollywood and the labels. That existed in other places.

The thing where the blank media had attacks. It showed up in the United States and then this just wiped that conversation out. Because who cares about blank media when this happens? We have privatized... Collection societies now is what we have. So it's like in other countries, it's known as like a collection society or like a tax or something, right? Or a culture tax or whatever. And the idea is, let's just...

Take a lot of money out of the group of people because clearly culture is a shared common good. And then we will take that money and divide it up among artists who are creating the shared good, right? Somehow that makes a little bit of sense, right? If you leave America for like five seconds, you go, oh, okay. Socialism, maybe that's okay, right? But in America, you can't talk about that. And instead, what we have is we have Spotify. We have Netflix. We have Amazon. What's the Kindle one?

Kindle Unlimited, right? Sure. These are all collection societies. They're taking a big pot of money from people and then dividing it up between artists. It is the same thing, but we've privatized it. And because we've privatized it, we have... There's like there's no democratic consensus around it. There's no governance, no oversight. We have no input. And so we've just got the worst of both worlds. And that's America in so many different ways.

I will point out that one difference about leaving America and looking at the systems there, particularly when it comes to culture, they are all on guard. against American culture totally dominating their societies. So they're like, we have to make sure we prop up Canadian radio. Like, propping up Canadian radio is the most important issue in Canadian culture. So they... build entire systems to fund Canadian artists and make sure their radio stations play Canadian bands. Because otherwise...

Just a flood of cheap American culture would like take over. This is true in all these countries around the world. So like there's a little bit of like shared common good. There's also just a little bit of like.

Boy, it would be great to have some artists from our own country that can make a movie. Boy, it would be great to not be America. I mean, it's like, there's that internet post that's like, congratulations, we'll continue to be your portrait of Dorian Gray in the attic. Like, right? Like, it's a, yeah, yeah. All right, we need to take one more break, and then let's get to the version history questions, which are going to be particularly weird in this episode. We'll be right back.

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where taste recognizes taste. All right, we're back. So we do the same eight questions for everything we talk about on Virgin History. Let's start with the first question. What was the best thing about LimeWire? Not applicable. I mean, this is sort of a unique one, right? The first two questions are the best thing and the worst thing, and it's just all the free music. I love applying those questions.

to this episode is just such a disaster because the first three questions are all inapplicable. Question number three. All right, we're going to skip the first two because the best thing and the worst thing is free music. It's free music. It's like, no, it's like, so the best thing is copyright infringement. The worst thing is copyright infringement.

Let's get to number three. Number three, I have a thing I would like to posit. Question number three is, would LimeWire have been a bigger hit if Apple made it? And this is my favorite. Alternate future thing we have debated in a long time, which is what if instead of doing iTunes, Apple did file sharing? What if Apple decided not to be legit, decided, you know, screw this. We're going to make the iPod and we're going to make a file sharing system.

and you're going to love it. And I have a theory I would like to posit, which is that Apple could have done a very good thing for the file sharing world, which is make it not terrifying. Like a thing that I kept coming up with over and over. in file sharing and in researching for this episode is that like,

There was not just this latent sense that you're doing something wrong every time you open up a file sharing app, but that you might destroy your computer or do something horrible or cause some kind of mistake. Like I found this one thing. There was a 2007. case. And the DOJ arrested a guy named Gregory Thomas Kopaloff, who was using LimeWire...

to basically scour other people's computers for personal information. Because when you set up LimeWire, a really easy mistake to make was to give it access to every single file anywhere on your computer. And so lots of people were just like inadvertently uploading and making available.

all of their personal data everywhere on their computer to anyone who was looking for it. So you could just poke around the file system in people's computers. And so this guy was basically going into people's MimeWire libraries of files that were just on their computer. finding credit card information, and he spent $73,000 worth of other people's money that he found on LimeWire and ended up pleading guilty and was sentenced to, I think, four years in prison.

Then there was another one, this huge data breach in 2008 that happened because somebody at a financial firm got on LimeWire. Again, bad configuration. In 2008? 2008. This is like at the end of LimeWire. And ends up exposing the names and information of a bunch of like high powered people, including Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who gets embroiled in this. And this is just a thing that happened over and over again that like, A, every time you open.

limewire or any other file sharing network you run the risk of downloading malware or doing something problematic to your computer And B, there are all these other flaws in the system that could cause you huge problems. And to me, I'm like, you know, what would be sick is the Apple file sharing network that just solves these problems and is only for pirated music.

This is very different now. Apple has vastly more scale and they're good at security in the ways they're good at security. At the time, a core problem here is that no one had pondered. What if we put all the computers on a network together? It just hadn't come up. That is true. They're like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to give you a modem. And then this one application, America Online, we'll just do all the internet stuff for you. That'll do the connectivity.

And then you'll quit. And then that application will not touch the rest of your computer. And then we got to this place where it's like, okay, here's Windows. Not very secure. What if it was online? And like, just no one had ever thought this through. Right.

like zero percent thought this through and so you run into all this stuff where it's like i've exposed my entire local file system to everyone on the network because like the operating system has never contemplated this possibility and so apple at this time is just running around being like, we're so much more secure than Windows. At every opportunity, they're like, you know, it doesn't have viruses. It's the Mac.

You know, it doesn't have these problems with the Mac. And the response every single time was because no one has a Mac. Right. You don't have any market share. No one has bothered to build a virus for you. No one cares about your shit, dude. And so like all of these apps like don't have this problem on the Mac.

Because they just haven't figured out how to do it. And by the time Apple comes up, they're like, someone has been like, oh, these computers are going to be in the network. Someone should think about that. Hey, Steve, we're going to put all the computers in the network. Yeah. So you're saying, yes, Apple definitely could have made it. No. I'm saying they would have.

They would have, like, OS 9 would have died in, like, massive ways if they tried to do this. They were not ready for this. New idea. We're just going to network all the iPods directly, and I can just listen to your iPods. Firewire cable, firewire cable. Yeah, that would have worked.

All right, cool. So we figured it out. I love it. Question number four, if you could go back and make it yourself, what would you do differently? I'm installing you at the beginning of LimeWire as CEO. We work for Mark because he runs the hedge fund. I would have sold it faster. I would flip the shit ASAP. It's like he waited too long. He should have seen the writing on the wall. Get out. Who do you think is buying it? Microsoft.

I mean, this is a time of desperation. I would have started the company in Sweden. Let's be honest. Let's go forum shopping a little bit. You can't get me. If you're doing hacks. Right. You're like, I decentralized the index. You can't get me like you're like, you can't get me because I'm literally in Sweden. And they still got those guys. OK, question number five. What feature of LimeWire should every current.

music app or platform have my my feature is i still think This is a piracy thing in general. The thing where you could go look at all the music somebody else had on their computer was awesome. And I want more of that. I want to be able to snoop on people's music libraries again. Yeah, that'd be good. This should come back. I'm deeply embarrassed of my own music library. But, like, there was a time.

The whole idea was look at other people's music. That was a fun period. Because you get to show off your collection. But not only that, there was like tribalism based on how you did your file names. Right. Oh, interesting. Because like not everyone had the same format for file names. And some people liked to have the album name in there, but other people liked to put the album name in the in the file structure. And then but sometimes you'd have.

artist, album name, song name. Sometimes it was just the song name and then it would be nested inside the thing. I don't know. We should bring that tribalism back. I remember when I was going through, you would find somebody who had like... done all of the metadata really cleanly. This guy. And then you'd be like, I'm going to go look at all of their music. I know, I know. I am now prioritizing this stranger's music.

Because they did all the tags correctly. Yeah, Neil, you were this person for sure. 100%. I had thoughts on which utilities were the best, on batch changing tags. What was the order of the file name? It was artist, album, song title. Okay. That was very important to me. Yeah, I believe that. But this, by the end, the file names were immaterial to the ID3 tags. Right, sure.

Yeah, yeah, by the end, yes. So the folder structure was artist, album, song title, so the file name was just the song title, but you understand, David, the metadata was contained in the text. Did you put the track number at the beginning of the song title? No, because it was all in the tags, bro. It's all new tags, bro. iTunes updates had support for new kinds of tags, and this was a very big deal. When the tags became good, it was game-changing. It was wonderful. It was great.

I remember spending alarming amounts of time reorganizing music inside of my iTunes library. There was quite a lot of time spent doing that. Quite a lot of energy and investment. And you could show it off to your friends.

Look at me. I've got such a clean, beautiful library. What's up with your library? All right. Question number six. Is there an alternate timeline in which LimeWire was more or even more successful?

I kind of think LimeWire timed itself perfectly. Yeah, it is the most successful version of itself that it could have been. It really should have either failed earlier or just not. Yeah, it seems... shocking to me that it existed as long as it did yeah like it had a 10 year run that's kind of a like in that world is a long time I do think there's an interesting like if it had started

10 years later or even five years later and hadn't been the one that the RIAA decided to break in half and had gotten a real chance to actually like make Spotify-ish deals and try to do the... go legit turn it would have been interesting to see it try and i think it probably wouldn't have worked because by the time you do any of the file sharing stuff you've just you've just burned all of those bridges but like

If if they were serious about wanting to turn into that other thing, the move is start five years later and don't be the one that becomes the target for everybody and sort of like live to fight another day. But I don't think it would have worked. Yeah, I don't I don't think so. I think that they. At this point, Peer to Peer was so anathema. I think that in order, the universe in which any of this stuff succeeds is it starts way earlier. Like the fork happens with Napster.

The fact that Napster did not close that deal with Sony that everyone thought that they were going to close. Close watchers thought that Napster was going to make a deal with Sony Music. Because Sony also was making MP3 players. So they were the label that was out of lockstep with the other labels. Because they were also making the thing that had substantial non-infringing uses, right?

But no, Sony's stuck with the other labels. And so in the forking universe where that deal gets made, Napster survives and we see just a different universe of even cases. And LimeWire never makes it. LimeWire just never makes it, period. Yeah. So this was the best universe for LimeWire, where its competitors got sued out of existence before it got sued out of existence. I want to be 100% clear that Sarah's best universe for LimeWire involves a $72 trillion damages judgment.

This is the best it could have gone for you. Could have been higher. Question number seven. Could you reboot LimeWire now? Parentheses, not as an NFT. No. The only future for these kinds of brands is to be NFTs. Do you know how old, defunct consumer electronics brands get bought up by weird Chinese distributors and Polaroid's back? These things, only NFTs. Okay, my only case for this would be, do you think it's possible that there is enough...

uh, nostalgia that if they were like, we're just doing Spotify, but it's called LimeWire, that it might work. Like Spotify does like a South by Southwest stunt where they just rebrand. Sure. Why not? The Lime coin gets so valuable that they buy Spotify, rebranded as LimeWire. Spotify doesn't have enough problems with its artist reputation. They might as well just go all the way to LimeWire. Yeah. No, I think the answer is no. And the way that I know is because.

They have tried to do it with Napster like 35 times. Napster over and over and over keeps making comebacks and no one cares. Napster falls in the same category as the DeLorean in my mind. So they keep trying to bring back DeLoreans all the time. They're like, the DeLorean's back. And everyone's like, the DeLorean's back. And then it fails. I'm like, bro, no one cares about a DeLorean. They want time machines. And you have not made a time machine.

Yeah, the doors that go like this are not the reason people love the DeLorean. The weird tin can triangle car at every scale has now proven to be a failure. Have you thought about making a working flux capacitor? And like, Napster has the exact same brand problem.

Yeah. Yeah. Fair. I agree. All right. Question number eight. Does LimeWire belong in the Virgin History Hall of Fame? As you both know, the Virgin History Hall of Fame. nebulous, and vibes-based. The answer's no. I don't even know. It's hard, no. Whatever the rules are. I think that's right. Sarah? Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't. I mean, my answer is similar to the one about...

sort of forking universes. I think Napster belongs in the Hall of Fame and LimeWire does not. LimeWire had a freak accident history in which it was the last one standing because it did not. It just wasn't important enough. And then it had all of the market share because it was the last one standing and then it died. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I think LimeWire is like a good footnote in the story, but does not belong in the Hall of Fame. Yeah. I agree. All right.

All right. Thank you both. This is very fun. I got lawyered at for a while. This was my goal. I hope you had a good time. I loved it very much. We're just going to call this episode Substantial Non-Infriging Uses, and no one is ever going to watch or listen to it, and I'm very excited about it. That's it for the show. Thank you so much to both of you for being here. Thank you.

for watching and listening. As always, you can watch all of our episodes on YouTube. You can listen to them wherever you get podcasts. The best way to support us and all of this is to subscribe to TheVerge.com. Please do not take our content for free. He's skipping the commercials. We will see you next time. Thank you as always.

Version History is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Eric Gomez, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Studio support from Chris Shurtleff. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to subscribe to the new Version History podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive.