Version History: LimeWire

25:44And what you get is it goes to the Supreme Court and Supreme Court goes, well, don't love this. Right. And and what they do is they make up a new doctrine of copyright law. So they make up a doctrine. It's called inducement. okay um and essentially the idea is okay sure yeah you didn't host anything but you were like come come here come here kid in french copyright like right like it's like the and and the examples that they give are kind of wild the stranger opening the door to the van it's it is like it can be kind of vague a little bit in some ways so it's like the fact that they were billing themselves as a certain kind of service or like even the fact that like grokster like the name is stir right in the like in the name like or that they have like a pause there for one second yes the supreme court was like there's a stir in the name and that makes people think of napster you did it like it was that's in there it's like open nap was like what like one of the one of the services had a thing like a sub spin out thing called open nap and then there were like there were like they the way that they advertise their services to people or the fact that like certain keywords would prompt people to find this application, right?

26:58Those were the things that they were pulling together. And it's like, yes, people did understand that this was Napster's successor. But there was no legal theory that said, you look kind of like Napster, ergo you're illegal. This was new. It is true that this hues to the facts of what was happening at the time. But to make law out of that, it's very strange. It's a very, very strange outcome. And I think importantly what happens is that substantial non-infringing uses goes away as a standard. Well, it's still technically the law, but it's really hard to rely on now. Like people just don't do it.

27:39because if even if there are substantial non-infringing uses but i'm kind of but you're winking at you to do the bad stuff yeah it's like it doesn't matter anymore it's like yeah yeah if your business is taking something for zero dollars and then trying to make some dollars they're gonna like yeah it's inducement got it right does it does it look like this thing that we obviously know is bad are you taking stuff for like and it's it's here we are in the ai era Yeah. And where there's like infinity lawsuits about this. And like this is there is a world in which Meta and OpenAI and whoever else shows up in court and is like substantial non infringing uses.

28:17And then there's a world in which, hey, you're you're basically helping people steal if not having stolen yourself and probably definitely having stolen yourself in this case of some of these companies. And substantial non-infringing uses, if you think about it, in this period when it's happening, like you're seeing sort of the birth of Web 2.0, right? You can see how important it's about to become where it's like, oh, YouTube. Like, yeah, I'm putting up videos that don't have like any copyright attached except for maybe mine. and then also people are putting up music videos that are owned by various record labels or whatever should you all of youtube become illegal based on that like right like so every single website is dealing with the substantial non-infringing uses problem as soon as substantial non-infringing uses stops being a reliable standard then people start going oh wait a second there's this law called the DMCA passed in 1999 and people when it did people were like ah this is like you know this is a real mixed bag of a law but it really comes to prominence after Grokster where this one legal standard no longer something that people feel comfortable with they go all right we're going to go to DMCA Safe Harbor now we're going to go hide behind Safe Harbor we're going to set up our DMCA agents notice and takedown regime and that's when Web 2.0 looks like what it looks like now.

29:42Got it. Okay. That's really interesting. And this actually, this all gives me way more context for something I read right after all this happened. There was a great, the New York Times had a big story right after Grokster was decided. It was the day after. And they actually called Mark Gorton at LimeWire and asked him how he felt. And he was super spooked by this whole thing. And his quote was, some people are saying that as long as I don't actively induce infringement, I'm okay. I don't think it'll work out that way. And he said the court handed a tool to judges that they can declare inducement whenever they want to.

30:16They sure did. They did. They absolutely did.

30:46I'm psychoanalyzing our man Mark here. There's this sense of like, okay, I can tweak the formula and I can make it work. Like I'm not going to make the Napster mistake of hosting an index of all of the stuff available on my system. I'm going to treat it differently. I'm going to treat it like a business. We're going to be a little more legit and it's going to be fine. And then this happens and he goes, oh, maybe this whole thing was just a house of cards and now it is falling down. Yeah, I think that there's this really worrisome thing happening where if you look at the Grokstra oral arguments, actually, people keep bringing up the iPod.

31:22And there is like this implicit understanding that the iPod is okay because it's an example of an American company making good, right? Like it's like it is very much you can hear the assumption in people's voices like, oh, yeah, iPod's legal. But what makes the iPod different from this? Because you don't want to make the iPod illegal. Like when, you know, just the sheer hard drive space indicates that this is for people with gigantic music libraries. Where do you get a gigantic music library? Nobody has the money for that. Right. And yeah. So like this thing that that this Wall Street bro is trying to do where he's like piggybacking off of the piracy wave into something legitimate.

32:02argument, arguably if you sort of like, you know, close one eye and like look like kind of blurry at the picture, you're like, oh, yeah, iTunes is kind of that, right? But there was like, yeah, like even Napster thought that it was going to sort of do the pivot and make deals with the record labels. Like everyone thought that they were going to eventually go legitimate and monetize and so on and so forth, which is, of course, what we're hearing now from the AI companies. It's like, it's like, infringe copyright now and then make the deals later. So pretty quickly, Limewire starts to do basically exactly that.

32:36Actually, can I offer you just a quote of how the content industry was thinking during this whole time? Because inducement is very important in the content industry. They do not like substantial non-infringing uses. In other countries around the world, they have actually put taxes on blank media. So if you went and bought a blank cassette tape or a blank CDR, the music industry would get paid. because they were like, people are going to use that for piracy. Just the act of buying blank media should offer us a cut. The music industry went to war with Apple trying to get a cut of every iPod. And they got that cut from Microsoft, which resulted in no money, but they got that cut.

33:16So the content industry just has this very clear view that like, this is our money. And if you mess with the money, you need to give us some of it. And so I just, here's this quote, and I'm going to it's years and years and years later and it's going to sound bananas to this audience. Okay. So there's while this is all happening there's basically the same litigation is happening around TiVo and digital PVRs. Oh sure. Personal video recorders. More or less the same reason. Right. It's a VCR but now there's a hard drive in it. We're going to relitigate the whole thing because the technology is different.

33:49And there's this one comes out it's called the Sonic Blue 4000 and it can automatically skip the ads. It can detect the ads and as you watched the content it can skip them. So here's a quote from Jamie Kellner, who at the time is the chairman and CEO of the Turner Broadcasting Division of AOL Time Warner. Okay. Famous success, Turner Broadcasting Division of AOL Time Warner. Here's a quote. These are Jamie Kellner. He says this in 2002. Skipping commercials is theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise, you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis.

34:26anytime you skip a commercial you're actually stealing the programming good lord like just go to any young verge reader today and be like is skipping commercials theft and they're like no like absolutely not but at the time this was all one product that all these companies were selling right and so these new computery things that could take the content and play them back in different ways or get the content from piracies because the hard drives are so big that like they Like, it was like you were getting in the car and being like, go up. And they were just like, my brain doesn't work that way.

35:00Like, I don't know what you're talking about. Stealing the commercials is obviously theft. And this is the disconnect that inducement solves. So to that point, actually, let me just play you a montage we made of some of the chatter around all things music piracy at the time. Because the vibes are all over the place. We have South Park and then a bunch of very serious RIAA people. Let me just play you this montage. You think downloading music for free is not a big deal? Downloading films is stealing. If you do it, you will face the consequences. Downloading is the only way to go. And the best thing about it, it's free.

35:42Downloading free, not likely. They're egregious uploaders sharing music on the internet in the range of 800 songs per person. Joel Tenenbaum fighting a$675 ,000 fine for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs. The Supreme Court refusing his appeal. This became such a joke that it ended up on South Park, but it also people are like dead serious about it. All right, we need to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about the many, many, many lawsuits that also came for LimeWire. We'll be right back.

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36:57Get him a three-pack of new underpants. And with Amazon Black Friday Week starting November 20th, you can save up to 40 % on the gifts everyone wants, like the latest toys and housewares. And the gifts they need, like underpants. And Ricky, wear them, please. All right, we're back. So I want to get into LimeWire dying, which happens very quickly here. But a couple of other interesting things are happening along the way here. First of all, LimeWire keeps doing new stuff. It started supporting BitTorrent in 2004. BitTorrent started to become a thing. LimeWire really wants to do this. It also launched a messaging app.

37:37This was a thing in file sharing for a while. The everything app. Yeah, it was like, this is a way to send illegal music files directly to your friend. And so it's like it really is pushing towards this idea of wanting to be more than just a piracy app, even though it is mostly a piracy app. It's also trying to figure out if there is a way to make all of this work a little better. Right after Grokster, they started thinking, OK, maybe we'll ban people from sharing licensed files. We'll just remove all of that stuff from the platform. And it pisses off a bunch of its contributors so much that they leave and create FrostWire.

38:15which is another pretty successful fire sharing app, basically like pirated out of LimeWire because they were like, no, we don't want to go legit. We want to download music. So all of this is happening simultaneously. And then a bunch of lawsuits come for LimeWire, kind of two at once. There's one from Arista Records, which sues LimeWire. But the big one is the RAAA, which is the it's real sort of first huge swing since Grokster comes at LimeWire. And a thing I'm realizing now as I go back over this, it was all inducement. Like a huge part of this lawsuit came down to, ironically, LimeWire's website, which when you went to LimeWire.com, one of the things that it said was like not it didn't quite say come here to download illegal music for free, but it basically did.

39:11And it talked about the search. It talked about the download speeds. It talked about the sorting by genre, all the stuff you could find, all the music you could find, everything that was available. And it was like, it was right on the edge of being like a library full of illegal music for you to download. which is funny because on the one hand it's like well you obviously didn't learn anything from what you're doing here with Grokster but it was like really really on the edge of of inducement there's there's a there's a trend here that again plays out over and over again yeah there's a law and then a bunch of tech companies come up with a technical solution to the law so with you know Napster is illegal because Napster owns a central index of all the files in the network, even though the transfers are peer-to-peer.

39:57And then they go out of business because of a lawsuit. And the tech industry, which doesn't look like the tech industry of today, it looks like a bunch of people just starting companies, but a bunch of tech people are like, okay, the law said you can't do that. What if we decentralize the index and make the protocol open source and call it Nutella for some reason? And then Grokster, or LimeWire is built on the back of this. Grokster had a different solution to the Napster problem, right? Like, and Grokster goes up and they rule as you can't do inducement. And so what you're seeing of LimeWire being right on the edge is yet another solution to the problem.

40:33How far can we go before it's inducement? And the only thing that they did was they calibrated wrong. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And so they get caught because they went too far. And that's, this game never works. Like at the end of the day, the rights holders, the United States of America are entirely too powerful. And they will be like, no, you're just telling people to steal our stuff. And the courts now have this tool. It's like, yep, you sure are. And there's like nothing. There's no rational standard underneath that beyond. Yep, it sure looks like that. I mean, judges also really hate when defendants are smug.

41:11Right. Like that's the thing where they go. So, because it's like, because the defendant's sitting there going, what did I do? Didn't I do it right? And then, yeah, the judge is going to be like, no, this is too cute. What do you think I am? An idiot? Like, no. And then often the tech industry is like, yes. Yeah. Right. And then there's all these quotes from this time that are just people like, the law is can't keep up with the tech industry. And the judge is like, no, but your website's like, do you like stealing stuff? Like, it's not that hard to figure out what you're doing. But there is one other turn in this that I think is really interesting, and I want you guys to explain this to me.

41:44So one of the things that came up in this ruling, which is a district court in Manhattan. So going all the way back to the Grokster thing, right? So they decide to try and figure out if there's a way to do this in a more legal way. And one of the things that LimeWire does is reach out to a bunch of record labels to get basically like catalog metadata in order to figure out if they can build a filter against that catalog that would block all of these licensed songs from being shared on the service. Right. Try to figure out an automated way essentially to be like, oh, I know what song that is and that can't be shared.

42:21One of the things they were hoping to do then was strike deals with all the record labels to make a paid service. Right. You can sort of see the turn there. Right. We're going to make it illegal to share the stuff that people are sharing and then we're going to make them pay to do it. And it's like that's the sort of the two turns he had been planning for a while. But I think that all gets accelerated after Grokster. But then the judge in this case said that because that was the plan and because they were developing this filter, it actually supported the RAA's argument that he and they knew that a huge part of LimeWire was to trade and share illegal files.

43:00And so just by virtue of the fact that you were trying to solve this problem, you are acknowledging it as a problem and thus your service is illegal. I would characterize that differently. Okay. I think if you take a hostage and then demand a ransom, you are probably liable for kidnapping. You probably have a hostage, yeah. Like, that is a totally bad faith negotiation. Okay. Right? We have created the greatest threat to your business that has ever existed. Sure. We would like to legitimize it. Pray I don't alter it further. What are you talking about? And then just to contextualize the music industry, the bottom has fallen out of the music industry by this point.

43:40Right? Like ringtones are the great hope of the music industry at this moment in time. Crazy Frog is going to save the music industry, not iTunes downloads yet. Right? So people have just stopped buying music. They've stopped buying CDs, which were hugely profitable. they're not buying one dollar a song itunes purchases at the volume necessary to replace all that revenue and we're like here's what we're gonna do at &t is gonna sell crazy frog for a thousand dollars per phone right it was like what is going on so like the music industry is now in dead panic and they're looking at this hostage negotiation i mean like absolutely not fair i mean when you put it like that and so i'm surprised the raa would agree with you Yeah.

44:27At the end of this. Who have I become? Right. Somehow Palpatine has returned. You're a real monster. And I think, Sarah, this also goes to your point. One of the things. Let me just read you a quote. This is from Mitch Bainwall, who's the RIA's CEO at the time. He thought his cleverness. He's talking about Mark Gordon. He thought with his cleverness that he could get away with it. He's the Bernie Madoff of Internet crime, which is very good. He was thumbing his nose at the rule of law to profiteer enormously. And so I think it is there is something to the like this guy is this is all obviously bad faith.

44:56And that's what the record label said, too, over and over. Like, they reach out and they're like, oh, would you like to make a deal? And they're like, why on earth would we know? We would like you to die. And then there's just the FrostWire problem. Yeah. Sure, maybe you can make a deal with Gordon and LimeWire. And now it costs$10 a month to use LimeWire and we've created Proto Spotify. But it turns out that everyone is still doing piracy. And what we need to do is kill that to create these new business models. Right. Yeah. So all of this goes for a while. And in 2010, the RAA, by the way, went after$72 trillion worth of damages in this case.

45:34Yeah, it's like, what is it, greater than the entire world's GDP or something like that? Which is very good. I really appreciate that from LimeWare. But so the RAA wins this case in 2010, wins an injunction, and it essentially, this is the end of LimeWare. It takes a minute for it to like properly— Wait, losing$72 trillion in damages? Who would have thought they didn't come back? I will say they end up settling for$105 million, which I would argue from from if I'm starting with nothing and you're starting with$72 trillion and we landed$105 million. I feel like I won that negotiation. We're much closer to my number than your number.

46:12This is the worst game of prices I've ever played. Yeah, my bid is$72 trillion. I'm going to go on the high side. I'm going to win the showcase showdown every time. $1. Let's do this. which like by the way that is another wild thing about copyright law is the statutory damages like the numbers you see are like just they don't make any sense because they're tuned to a different reality yeah right so it's like it's you're looking at uh minimum maximum statutory damages um for like non-willful you're looking at 750 to 30 000 per infringement and then for willful so So like when you do a really bad job, it goes all the way up to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per infringement.

46:57This makes sense in a society where infringing is like, I don't know, you're pressing a bootleg record. This makes no sense in a society where you are downloading hundreds of songs, right, like in your little college dormitory and definitely makes no sense in a society where you released software where millions of songs are getting like. getting passed back and forth. So, yeah, this is where you're getting greater than the whole world's GDP. Yeah, the numbers are all just pretend. Yeah, copyright law is maybe the only law that gets this weird, gets this absolutely wild. And it's the only law that functionally regulates the internet.

47:37It's super cool. The one we just keep doing. By the way, on the damages front, you know it doesn't make sense because the RIAA ran an entire program to stop kids from doing it at$5 ,000 a settlement. not 72 trillion dollars and all those kids were downloading thousands of songs right mark ran a hedge fund he had money so you know you gotta 72 t's equivalent of his money to 72 trillion dollars was me to five grand in college i mean just a loaded gun right it's like it is it is you will pay whatever you can because we have this other gigantic number that we've calculated through this cudgel of a law and we will like yeah like you bring They bring a machine gun to every negotiation, the$72 trillion machine gun.

48:25Yeah, it's copyright. It will radicalize you. Yeah, seriously. So, yeah, so fall of 2010, there's an injunction against LimeWire. They do the damages trial in early 2011. And by fall of 2011, LimeWire's dead. And it was like through this whole process, it was kind of starting to die. I think a lot of people sort of saw the writing on the wall and were seeing these lawsuits. And I think the chilling effect of those$5 ,000 lawsuits was very real. Like it took a while, but it worked. Like I think the PR campaign that that essentially was, I think was as successful as any of these other moves, right?

49:04At least that's how I remember it. Well, I mean other things started to happen, right? So the iTunes store existed. Steve Jobs famously did not want DRM on music for a whole variety of reasons. that led to a very different kind of file sharing because people had iPods. You could plug the iPods into your friend's computer. You get the songs that way. This is all happening outside. Spotify launches 2006. Spotify launched in 2006 because the music industry in Europe was at zero. Right. Talk about negotiating in a hostage situation. It was dead. It was just gone. And all of those labels in Europe were like, we have a lot of reasons to try something new because no one's going to buy it.

49:42Piracy was rampant in Europe, particularly in Sweden. I think there are laws protecting pirates in Sweden in a way that hadn't really happened here. So, like, it was just a different, like, the Pirate Bay, the torrent site, still operates in Sweden. So, Spotify just had this incentive to create this new structure. And it didn't come here for a while because the labels thought they could go back in time. Right. And that all of this is happening sort of in the background of LimeWire, just, like, meeting its final fate. Yeah, LimeWire did, to its credit, at one point, launch a music store. It had no music anyone wanted to listen to in it, but it existed.

50:20But the biggest thing that happened in 2011 is that Spotify launched in the U.S. And that's when it all just flipped. Because it's like, that was the time all of a sudden, and I remember having these conversations where it was like, all of a sudden you could just listen to all the music that you wanted. Yeah. And then Spotify was just the game. Yeah. It was like the whole you have to be easier than piracy thing was like it finally was. It was just true. It turned out to be true. Like which I don't know. I mean, there's a whole set of arguments to be made about whether or not Spotify costs the right amount of money, whether they're paying artists enough.

50:52But like the sort of basic contention of people wanted to listen to music on their devices and like not be tied down to records, CDs or their computers. They just wanted to something a little more portable. Yeah. It turned out to be true. Yeah. So, OK, so two two codas to the LimeWire story and then we're going to we're going to move on and do the version history questions here. uh limewire has been through a bunch of weird lives for a while it was like a couple of limewire employees bought the domain name and redirected it to a different file sharing service for a while which i thought was very funny um more recently it was revived as a an nft project uh which is gross and also like feels right it's exactly right yeah but then i just looked i looked at the website today and it is uh it's a file sharing website like if you go to limewire.com it just looks like we transfer which is very weird uh but it is also a crypto token um also perfect but the reason i find this company fascinating the reason i want to talk about is it really does feel like there's a certain version of this story that i think starts with napster and i think it ends with limewire like it is the last one to be sort of sued out of insane existence by the ria in this way such that like it ended right at the moment the this other version of the music industry is starting to appear and we just kind of never looked back i i mean i agree with that i i don't think that those things are independent of each other okay napster and limewire destroyed a version of the music industry it just brought it to an end sure yeah like the music industry is riding high they're like would you like another britney spears we've manufactured one in orlando right And they just did.

52:39They were just able to do it. MTV was a dominant cultural force. So much money was in a monoculture of music. There was just a vast array of artists who were making medium good livings in a way that kind of doesn't exist now. Yeah. Artists were able to do things like claim they weren't going to sell out because they were just making enough money. And now it's like every artist already has a brand integration in their first single. That's weird, but it's because the music has been totally devalued by all of the systems that came after Napster, after LimeWire. And so there was a moment when what people were buying was music.

53:19There was a moment when there was just like economic value attributed to a song. And these companies just took that to zero. Now these songs are worth zero because you can get them for free. And the music industry had to basically recreate a business model. And a lot of the business model is like, yep, we're going to give you 0.0015 Limelight tokens per listen or whatever it is to the artists. and the artists are going to figure out that they have to basically live on tour and they have to write the songs in hotel rooms. The songs are going to be really, really short. So you get more listens. We're going to do brand integrations all day and all night because that's where the revenue is going to be.

53:55And something very big changed in the culture when you took the value of a song to zero dollars. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And it is like we spent then like a decade of breaking it and then the next decade was rebuilding it again in a totally different image. I like, okay, I'm actually gonna challenge that. I don't think it was these companies. I mean, like, yes, these companies made money off of it, but I think that this technology would have existed regardless. I think that the peer-to-peer, like, I mean, Nutella, Nutella, I don't know. I think that all of that stuff was going to get written.

54:31I think all of it was going to get distributed and I think that the piracy was going to happen. And we see the massive amounts of piracy coming through these programs like LimeWire built by Wall Street bros who are taking a cut off of the piracy. It's because the interface is a bit slicker, a bit nicer than whatever you're going to spin up through open source means or whatever, right? Right. But I think that if you strip all of the capitalism out of it, this big technological shift was going to kill music. It was just going to kill the music industry. And yeah, like there is this thing where you like step back and go, was that necessarily a good thing?

55:19maybe not but i think that it was going to happen i think that it was going to happen and at least the ri double a got their little cut of what would have been 72 trillion dollars if only they had made a made 72 trillion dollars yeah i mean you just wonder if they would have built more they wouldn't have i'm they wouldn't have but the all the systems we saw show up in other countries where your internet access came with a like a content fee that was paid to the culture companies, right, that was paid to Hollywood and the labels. That existed in other places. The thing where the blank media had a tax, it showed up in the United States, and then this just wiped that conversation out.

55:58Because who cares about blank media when this happens? We have privatized collection societies now is what we have. So it's like in other countries, it's known as like a collection society or like a tax or something, right, or a culture tax or whatever. And the idea is, let's just take a lot of money out of the group of people, because clearly culture is a shared common good. And then we will take that money and divide it up among artists who are creating the shared good, right? Somehow that makes a little bit of sense, right? If you leave America for like five seconds, you go, oh, okay. Socialism, maybe that's okay, right?

56:37But in America, you can't talk about that. And instead, what we have is we have Spotify, we have Netflix, we have Amazon, what's the Kindle one? Kindle Unlimited, right? These are all collection societies. They are taking a big pot of money from people and then dividing it up between artists. It is the same thing, but we've privatized it. And because we've privatized it, there's no democratic consensus around it. There's no governance, no oversight. We have no input. And so we've just got the worst of both worlds. And that's America in so many different ways. I will point out that one difference about leaving America and looking at the systems there, particularly when it comes to culture, they are all on guard against American culture totally dominating their societies.

57:29So they're like, we have to make sure we prop up Canadian radio. Like, propping up Canadian radio is the most important issue in Canadian culture. So they build entire systems to fund Canadian artists and make sure their radio stations play Canadian bands. because otherwise just a flood of cheap American culture would like take over. This is true in all these countries around the world. So like there's a little bit of like shared common good. There's also just a little bit of like, boy, it would be great to have some artists from our own country. Boy, it would be great to not be America. I mean, it's like it's what's there's that Internet post.

58:02It's like, congratulations, like we'll continue to be your portrait of Dorian Gray in the attic. Like, right. Like it's a yeah. Yeah. All right. We need to take one more break and then let's let's get to the version history questions, which are going to be particularly weird in this episode. We'll be right back.

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1:00:11I mean this is sort of a unique one right the first two questions are the best thing and the worst thing and it's just all the free music I love applying those questions to this episode it's just such a disaster because the first three questions are all inapplicable question number three all right we're gonna skip the first two because the first best thing and worst thing is free music it's free music no it's like so the the best thing is copyright infringement The worst thing is copyright infringement. Let's get to number three. Number three, I have a thing I would like to posit. Question number three is, would LimeWire have been a bigger hit if Apple made it?

1:00:43And this is my favorite alternate future thing we have debated in a long time, which is what if instead of doing iTunes, Apple did file sharing? What if Apple decided not to be legit, decided, you know, screw this. We're going to make the iPod and we're going to make a file sharing system and you're going to love it. And I have a theory I would like to posit, which is that Apple could have done a very good thing for the file sharing world, which is make it not terrifying. Like a thing that I kept coming up with over and over in file sharing and in researching for this episode is that like there was not just this latent sense that you're doing something wrong every time you open up a file sharing app, but that you might destroy your computer or do something horrible or cause some kind of mistake.

1:01:29I found this one thing. There was a 2007 case and the DOJ arrested a guy named Gregory Thomas Koppeloff, who was using LimeWire to basically scour other people's computers for personal information. Because when you set up LimeWire, a really easy mistake to make was to give it access to every single file anywhere on your computer. And so lots of people were just like inadvertently uploading and making available all of their personal data everywhere on their computer to anyone who was looking for it. So you could just poke around the file system in people's computers. And so this guy was basically going into people's LimeWire libraries of files that were just on their computer, finding credit card information.

1:02:09And he spent$73 ,000 worth of other people's money that he found on LimeWire and ended up pleading guilty and was sentenced to, I think, four years in prison. Then there was another one, this huge data breach in 2008 that happened because somebody at a financial firm got on LimeWire. Again, bad configuration. In 2008? 2008. This is at the end of LimeWire. And ends up exposing the names and information of a bunch of high-powered people, including Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who gets embroiled in this. And this is just a thing that happened over and over again that like, A, every time you open LimeWire or any other file sharing network, you run the risk of downloading malware or doing something problematic to your computer.

1:02:54And B, there are all these other flaws in the system that could cause you huge problems. And to me, I'm like, you know what would be sick is the Apple file sharing network that just solves these problems and is only for pirated music. So this is very different now. Apple has vastly more scale and they're good at security in the ways they're good at security. At the time, a core problem here is that no one had pondered, what if we put all the computers on a network together? It just hadn't come up. That is true. They're like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to give you a modem and then this one application, America Online, will just do all the internet stuff for you.

1:03:31That'll do the connectivity and then you'll quit and then that application will not touch the rest of your computer. and then we got to this place where it's like okay here's windows uh not very secure what if it was online and like just no one had ever thought this through right like zero percent thought this through and so you run into all this stuff where it's like i've exposed my entire local file system to everyone who's looking yeah because like the operating system has never contemplated this possibility and so apple at this time is just running around being like we're so much more secure than windows like at every opportunity they're like you know it doesn't have viruses is uh the mac you know it doesn't have these problems the mac and the response every single time was because no one has a mac right you don't have any market share no one has bothered to build a virus for you like no one cares about your shit dude and so like all these apps like don't have this problem on the mac because they just haven't figured out how to do it and by the time apple comes up they're like someone has been like oh these computers are gonna be the network Someone should think about that.

1:04:35Hey, Steve, we're going to put all the computers in the network.

1:04:42Yeah. So you're saying, yes, Apple definitely could have made it. No. I'm saying they would have died in like massive ways if they tried to do this. They were not ready for this. New idea. We're just going to network all the iPods directly. And I can just listen to your iPods. Firewire cable. Firewire cable. Yeah. That would have worked. All right, cool. So we figured it out. I love it. Question number four. If you could go back and make it yourself, what would you do differently? I'm installing you at the beginning of LimeWire as CEO. We work for Mark because he runs the hedge fund. I would have sold it faster.

1:05:16Like, right? Like, I would have flipped the shit ASAP. Yeah. Like, it's like he waited too long. He should have seen the writing on the wall. Like, get out. Get out. Who do you think is buying it? Microsoft. I mean, like, this is a time of desperation. Added to Play is for sure or whatever. Yeah. I would have started the company in Sweden. Let's be honest. Oh, okay. That's pretty good. Let's go forum shopping a little bit. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. You can't get me. If you're doing hacks, right? You're like, I decentralized the index. You can't get me. Like, you're like, you can't get me because I'm literally in Sweden.

1:05:47And we still got those guys. Okay. Question number five. What feature of LimeWire should every current music app or platform have? My feature is I still think this is a piracy thing in general. The thing where you could go look at all the music somebody else had on their computer was awesome. And I want more of that. I want to be able to snoop on people's music libraries again. Yeah, that'd be good. This should come back. I'm deeply embarrassed of my own music library. But, like, there was a time where the whole idea was look at other people's music. That was a fun period. Because you get to show off your collection.

1:06:21But not only that, there was like tribalism based on how you did your file names, right? Oh, interesting. Because like not everyone had the same format for file names. And some people liked to have the album name in there, but other people liked to put the album name in the file structure. And then, but sometimes you'd have artist, album name, song name. Sometimes it was just the song name and then it would be nested inside the thing. I don't know. We should bring that tribalism back. I remember when I was going through, you would find somebody who had like done all of the metadata really cleanly.

1:06:58This guy. And then you'd be like, I'm going to go look at all of their music. I know. I am now prioritizing this stranger's music because they did all the tags correctly. Yeah, Neil, you were this person for sure. 100%. I had thoughts on which utilities were the best, on batch changing tags. What was the order of the file name? It was artist album song title. Okay. That was very important to me. Yeah, I believe that. But this, by the end, the file names were immaterial to the ID3 tags. Right. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. By the end. Yes. But like. The folder structure was artist album song title. So the file name was just a song title.

1:07:34But you understand, David, the metadata was contained in the tag. Did you put the track number at the beginning of the song title? No, because it was all in the tags, bro. It's all in the tags, bro. Like iTunes updates had support for new kinds of tags. Right. And this was like a very big deal. When the tags became good, it was game-changing. It was wonderful. It was great. I remember spending alarming amounts of time reorganizing music inside of my iTunes library. There was quite a lot of time spent doing that. Quite a lot of energy and investment. And you could show it off to your friends. Look at me.

1:08:10I've got such a clean, beautiful library. What's up with your library? All right. Question number six. Is there an alternate timeline in which LimeWire was more or even more successful? I kind of think LimeWire timed itself perfectly. Yeah, it's like it is the most successful version of itself that it could have been. Like it really should have either failed earlier or just not. Yeah, it seems shocking to me that it existed as long as it did. Yeah, like it had a 10-year run. That's kind of like given. In that world is a long time. It's kind of a while. I do think there's an interesting, like, if it had started 10 years later or even five years later and hadn't been the one that the RIAA decided to break in half and had gotten a real chance to actually, like, make Spotify-ish deals and try to do the go legit turn.

1:09:03It would have been interesting to see it try. And I think it probably wouldn't have worked because by the time you do any of the file sharing stuff, you've just burned all of those bridges. but like if they were serious about wanting to turn into that other thing the move is start five years later and don't be the one that becomes the target for everybody and sort of like live to fight another day but I don't think it would have worked. Yeah I don't think so. I think that they at this point peer to peer was so anathema I think that in order the universe in which any of this stuff succeeds is it starts way earlier like the fork happens with Napster the fact that Napster did not close that deal with Sony that everyone thought that they were going to close.

1:09:45Like, close watchers thought that Napster was going to make a deal with Sony Music because Sony also was making MP3 players. So they were the label that was out of lockstep with the other labels because they were also making the thing that had substantial non-infringing uses, right? But no, Sony stuck with the other labels. And so in the forking universe where that deal gets made, Napster survives and we see just a different universe of even cases. And LimeWire never makes it. LimeWire just never makes it, period. Yeah. So this was the best universe for LimeWire where its competitors got sued out of existence before it got sued out of existence.

1:10:30I want to be 100 % clear that Sarah's best universe for LimeWire involves a$72 trillion damages judgment.

1:10:38this is the best it could have gone could have been higher question number seven could you reboot lime wire now to be parentheses not as an nft no it's it's all the only future for these kinds of brands is to be nfts do you know how like old defunct consumer electronics brands get bought up by like weird chinese distributors and like polaroids back these things only nfts okay my my only case for this would be do you think it's possible that there is enough uh nostalgia that if they were like we're just doing spotify but it's called lime wire that it might work like spotify does like a south by southwest stunt where they just rebrand sure why not the lime lime coin gets so valuable that they buy spotify rebranded as lime wire Yeah, Spotify doesn't have enough problems with its artist reputation.

1:11:30They might as well just go all the way to LimeWire. Yeah. No, I think the answer is no. And the way that I know is because they have tried to do it with Napster like 35 times. Napster over and over and over keeps making comebacks and no one cares. Napster falls in the same category as the DeLorean in my mind. So they keep trying to bring back DeLoreans all the time. They're like, the DeLorean's back. And everyone's like, the DeLorean's back. And then it fails. And I'm like, bro, no one cares about a DeLorean. They want time machines. and you have not made a time machine. Yeah, the doors that go like this are not the reason people love the DeLorean.

1:12:03The weird tin can triangle car at every scale has now proven to be a failure. Have you thought about making a working flux capacitor? And like, Napster has the exact same brand problem. Yeah, yeah, fair. I agree. All right, question number eight. Does LimeWire belong in the Version History Hall of Fame? As you both know, the Version History Hall of Fame, nebulous and vibes based. The answer's no. I don't even know. It's a hard no. Whatever the rules are. I think that's right. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't. I mean, my answer is similar to the one about sort of forking universes. I think Napster belongs in the Hall of Fame and LimeWire does not.

1:12:40LimeWire had a freak accident history in which it was the last one standing because it did not, it just wasn't important enough and then it had all of the market share because it was the last one standing and then it died. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I think LimeWire is like a good footnote in the story, but does not belong in the Hall of Fame. Yeah. I agree. All right. All right. Thank you both. This is very fun. I got I got lawyered at for a while. This is this is my goal. I don't know what you had a good time. I loved it very much. We're just going to call this episode Substantial Not Infraging Uses and no one is ever going to watch or listen to it.

1:13:14And I'm very excited about it. That's it for the show. Thank you so much to both of you for being here. Thank you for watching and listening. As always, you can watch all of our episodes on YouTube. You can listen to them wherever you get podcasts. The best way to support us and all of this is to subscribe to TheVerge.com. Please do not take our content for free. He's skipping the commercials. It's them. We will see you next time. Thank you, as always.

1:13:41Version History is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Eric Gomez, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Studio support from Chris Shurtleff. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to subscribe to the new Version History podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive.

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