Andre Yoskowitz
1 Nov 2010 20:59
Last week we reported that LimeWire, once the world's most popular P2P client, had been officially shut down, following a four-year legal battle against the record industry.
A New York federal court issued a permanent injunction against the site, ruling that LimeWire caused a "massive scale of infringement" by intentionally giving users a platform to share millions of unauthorized music tracks.
At its peak, LimeWire was seeing 50 million monthly users.
Following the ruling, LimeWire has had to lay off 29 of its 100 staff members.
Curiously, the company will keep the other 71 working on an unknown new music service.
Says CEO George Searle, via AllThingsD: "Following the court-ordered injunction, we reduced our work force to extend our runway for bringing our new music service to market. Letting go of colleagues is never easy. If we could have brought about another solution, we would have."
The upcoming service is dubbed "Grapevine."