Kinda playing the devil’s advocate here, Limewire did clearly state in the EULA (end user license agreement) that it was prohibited to share files to which you did not own the copyright. It’s a cheap piece of defense, but really, if you create free software, what are the chances that you’re really going to be able to afford monitoring the users shared files folders?

Music, video, applications, etc. were all allowable shared content. To legitimately handle all copyright claims the owner of the company would need to employ a large number of technicians to disable content from sharing, or would use text based filters to eliminate maybe 1/5 of the content that was being illegally shared. Users would have simply misspelled artists names, and/or erased the ID3 tags that identify the artist in most MP3s.

You may have forced me into a rant long enough to have posted as an article, and perhaps with proper citation and research will become such.

Thanks for that.