14 DAY TRIAL // The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is mad that someone resurrected LimeWire in a form that is even better than before and claims that the culprit used to work or is still working at Lime Wire LLC.
At the end of October, RIAA won a case against Lime Wire LLC, the company which developed the formerly popular Limewire file sharing application.
As a result, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood ordered Lime Wire to disable the program's searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or all of its functionality.
The company complied with the order, however, on November 8 someone calling themselves MetaPirate released a version of the software dubbed LimeWire Pirate Edition (LPE).
"All dependencies on LimeWire LLC’s servers have been removed, all remote settings have been disabled, the Ask toolbar has been unbundled, and all features of LimeWire PRO have been activated for free," a source familiar with the LPE development effort told TorrentFreak at the time.
RIAA reacted to the news by writing to the court that Lime Wire is unable or unwilling to comply with the order and that the new software version was created by a current or former employee familiar with the code and who knows how to remove the restrictions.
In response, the Southern District of New York Federal Court ordered Lime Wire to hand over a list of everyone who had access to the private key used to sign the LimeWire SIMPP file [a file used to restrict the program] in the past year, as well as a list of anyone who might have had the knowledge to make the changes present in LPE.
In a statement to CNET, a Lime Wire spokeswoman stressed that the company does not know the identity of MetaPirate.
"Lime Wire is complying with the court-ordered injunction. We have informed the court we are not involved in the distribution of LimeWire Pirate Edition [and have not] used the name Meta Pirate," she said.
Meanwhile, Ars Technica quotes MetaPirate, who claims that LPE was created from open source LimeWire code and that neither him or the people who worked on the Pirate Edition have any connection to Lime Wire.