May 14, 2011 11:56 GMT  ·  By

Lime Wire LLC, the company behind the former LimeWire peer-to-peer file sharing application, has agreed to pay the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) $105 million in order to settle a 5-year-old copyright infringement lawsuit.

Until last October, when it was shut down via court order, Limewire was one of the most popular and oldest file sharing applications on the Internet.

The Java-based program was cross-platform and supported the gnutella P2P network, as well as the BitTorrent protocol.

RIAA's lawsuit against claimed that Lime Wire LLC knowingly facilitated and encouraged copyright infringement on a massive scale.

After it was awarded a permanent injunction that ordered the software company to stop distributing, selling, advertising or otherwise supporting LimeWire and also disable its functionality, RIAA filed for damages of an astonishing $75 trillion.

The industry association asked for the maximum statutory damage of $150,000 for each of the 11,000 infringed works specified in the lawsuit, a claim the judge described as absurd.

"We are pleased to have reached a large monetary settlement following the court's finding that both Lime Wire and its founder Mark Gorton are personally liable for copyright infringement.

"As the court heard during the last two weeks, Lime Wire wreaked enormous damage on the music community, helping contribute to thousands of lost jobs and fewer opportunities for aspiring artists," said Mitch Bainwol, chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), according to CNET.

However, it's unlikely that RIAA's legal success will have any real long-term impact on gnutella P2P file sharing traffic. It's true that following LimeWire's shutdown, file sharing activity levels plummeted, however, people are slowly discovering a program called Frostwire which is built on the LimeWire source code.

FrostWire was forked from LimeWire in 2004, in anticipation to legal action froom RIAA against Lime Wire. It was designed to provide an open source alternative in case LimeWire closed down and that's exactly what it currently does.