A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday granted the music industry's request to shut down the popular LimeWire file-sharing service, which had been found liable for copyright infringement.
The ruling by Judge Kimba Wood in Manhattan federal court halts one of the world's biggest services for letting consumers share music, movies and TV shows for free over the Internet.
Saying that LimeWire's parent Lime Wire LLC intentionally caused a "massive scale of infringement" involving thousands of works, Wood issued a permanent injunction that requires the company to disable its "searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality.
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Record companies "have suffered -- and will continue to suffer -- irreparable harm from Lime Wire's inducement of widespread infringement of their works," Wood wrote.
She called the potential damages "staggering," and probably "well beyond" the New York-based company's ability to pay.
The signed ruling was made available by The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents music companies. It has said Lime Wire has cost its members hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. A copy of the ruling was not immediately available on the public court docket. Read more
