Filesharing service LimeWire, officially shut down in December, and has sold off just about everything with value. But not everything, apparently.

Check out SoHo For Sale, a site that appears to be liquidating the former company’s furniture, piece by tasteful piece.

I’m not positive that everything listed here was part of LimeWire’s New York headquarters. But several LimeWire employees have confirmed that the beautiful product shots below were, in fact, taken in the company’s famously gorgeous office on lower Broadway.

“We’re the former occupants of a beautifully decorated SoHo cast iron, and we had great taste in furniture,” is the way the site described itself as of last Friday. That’s when I asked whoever runs the sohoforsale@gmail.com account for more details, and since then that language has disappeared from the site. But not from Google.

In any case, this really is some nice-looking stuff, no matter where it came from. I bet some of it ends up in a major music label’s office. Some samples, and asking prices:

8′x3′ Cypress (“90 percent sure [it's] Cypress”) two-piece conference tables, $2,500 each.

Solid Cypress (see above) tables, $2,750 each.

Custom day bed, $550.

“Vintage Argentinian Foosball table” – Sold! (Asking price $1,150)

While lots of music services are still trying to figure out how to make money by distributing copyrighted music you’ve heard of, SoundCloud is taking a different tack. As I wrote last fall:

It’s designed to let professional and amateur musicians share their own music with each other and the public, via cloud-based files that the company hosts.

Once the tunes are on SoundCloud’s servers, the service makes it easy to move the stuff around the Web, via its own widget and an API that’s showing up on lots of interesting sites, apps, services and devices, including Facebook and Apple’s iPad. You can load SoundCloud files into Spotify, the streaming music company that Index has also invested in.

The service uses the freemium model, offering most of its capabilities for free, and charging up to $700 a year for more storage and extra features.

You can also use SoundCloud for less enlightened purposes, like sharing music you don’t own. But the company has recently implemented an audible “fingerprinting” service, like the ones Google’s YouTube uses, which allows copyright owners to take down files they don’t want on the Web. And that should give the company legal cover, unless the YouTube/Viacom case takes a very different turn.

In a blog post announcing the funding, SoundCloud says it will use the money to scale faster and “be more present in the US.” It also posts short clips, using its service, from its new investors–Index’s Mike Volpi and Union Square’s Fred Wilson.

Here’s Wilson:
Thoughts on SoundCloud by fredwilson. Uploaded with SoundCloud Android

And Volpi:
Mike Volpi Audio Blog on Friday morning by mvolpi. Uploaded with SoundCloud iPhone

And if you’d like something more entertaining, here’s a very long mix of classic hip-hop, via Cut Chemist:

Cut Chemist – Hip Hop Lives (1985-1996) by Cut Chemist

Health documents with sensitive patient information can be found in “peer-to-peer” networks, which people typically use to share music files and the like. The programs used to navigate these networks often locate files on a user’s computer and share them–whether they’re music and videos or things like spreadsheets with health data. The issue can arise when health workers transfer data from firms’ proprietary software to their home computers. If they or someone in their family uses file-sharing software, files can be picked up.

Over a two-week period in 2009, the researchers were able to find more than 200 files that contained identifying information such as name, address, date of birth, social security numbers, insurance numbers and health-related information. It’s not much compared with the vast number of files in these networks, but it presents a big risk–for health companies as well as patients.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The music file-sharing service, which basically called it quits in October after losing a federal court case, is turning off or shelving most of its related products. But it has found a home for at least one of them: Its LimeExchange.com services marketplace is being swallowed by Freelancer.com, which describes itself as “the world’s largest outsourcing marketplace.”

Terms of the deal haven’t been released; Freelancer.com says it will “migrate” LimeExchange’s users to its own platform.

What’s that? You had no idea the people behind LimeWire also ran a freelance marketplace? Me neither.

But now that I’m looking, I see that Lime Labs, which formally ran LimeExchange, also lists a domain registration/hosting business and an open-source Web site-building service among its assets. Anyone know what’s become of those?

Big picture: New York-based LimeWire and its affiliated companies look like they will all be wound down by the end of the month.  Not coincidentally, the following month there are supposed to be federal court hearings in which the major music companies are going to try to extract millions from LimeWire owner Mark Gorton for copyright violations.

I don’t know that shuttering all the related companies will help Gorton hang on to his money. But anything that helps him focus on his legal problems can’t be a bad idea.

Not for much longer, it seems. The company is also closing its online music store at the end of the year. And I’m told that it has essentially abandoned efforts to launch a new, legal music service that it had spent much of the past year building.

A sign on the Web retailer’s homepage tells customers that it’s no longer accepting new payments, and the company has told vendors via email that the store will shutter on Dec. 31. (You can see a copy of the note at the bottom of this post.)

LimeWire hasn’t responded to my request for comment. And it’s not clear why the company is closing up the shop, because in this case, LimeWire shouldn’t be dealing with any legal issues. LimeWire operated the store the same way that Apple’s iTunes does–it took product that music labels (not the big ones, but small independents) wanted to sell and delivered it to customers.

Meanwhile, people familiar with the company tell me that it has also stopped pursuing plans to launch a new, legal music service that had been building throughout 2010.

As recently as October, the company had been talking up the prospects of the new service, and had invited me to see a preview of it even after the court ruling that shuttered its illegal file-sharing service. But LimeWire later rescinded the invitation, and said that its lawyers had advised it not to discuss the new service.

My hunch is that LimeWire is stripping down all of its remaining assets in advance of January court proceedings. Those are going to determine how much the company owes the major music labels that successfully sued it for copyright violations.

LimeWire had already laid off at least 30 percent of its workforce following the October court ruling.

A federal court has permanently enjoined the New York company from distributing its software, which lets users upload and download free, often illegal, copies of songs and other media. But earlier this week a new version, “LimeWire Pirate Edition,” surfaced online, purportedly created by a “secret” team of software developers.

“We demand that all persons using the LimeWire software, name, or trademark in order to upload or download copyrighted works in any manner cease and desist from doing so,” said a statement on LimeWire.com. The statement also asserted that the company is “taking all steps to comply with the injunction.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

A bit of a surprise: The company insists that it can keep its remaining employees working on a new music service.

LimeWire confirms that in the wake of last week’s shutdown, it let go of 29 of its 100-person workforce. Here’s CEO George Searle’s statement:

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.

I don’t know whether LimeWire’s new service, which the company has been referring to internally as “Grapevine,” will also be based on peer-to-peer technology or not; I should have more on that later. But I do know that the service won’t have any hope of working unless it can get the big music labels to sign on.

That’s theoretically possible, because LimeWire and owner Mark Gorton have talked with the labels about that sort of thing before. But they’ve talked for a very long time, and have never reached a pact in the past.

For now, at least, the labels appear to be set on extracting a very large chunk of Gorton’s hide, via the damages phase in their federal court case. That’s supposed to kick off in January.

You can read all of U.S. District Court Judge Kimba Wood’s ruling at the bottom of the post. But the short version is that Wood, using the Supreme Court’s Grokster decision as a guide, found that LimeWire is indeed guilty of copyright violations. In her words:

LimeWire… (1) is aware that LimeWire’s users commit a substantial amount of copyright infringement; (2) markets LimeWire to users predisposed to committing infringement; (3) ensures that LimeWire enables infringement and assists users committing infringement; (4) relies on the fact that LimeWire enables infringement for the success of its business; and (5) has not taken meaningful steps to mitigate infringement.

LimeWire is unusual among post-Napster, post-Grokster file-sharing operations in that it operates out in the open, in the U.S. The company, based in New York City and owned by investor Mark Gorton, actually sells a smattering of music itself with the blessing of some of the smaller music labels. But while the company has been engaged in a long back-and-forth with the big guys, it has never reached a settlement.

Meanwhile, almost all of the music available on the service (93 percent, according to a study used in the lawsuit) and even more of the stuff actually downloaded (98.8 percent, via the same study) is protected by copyright and should not have been there. Court documents state that LimeWire generated revenue of $20 million in 2006.

LimeWire does tell its users they shouldn’t steal music. This is the warning you get when you try to do so:

But that’s not enough, Wood ruled. And certainly not when the service was going out of its way to court users searching Google (GOOG) for free tunes. From her ruling:

LimeWire conducted a marketing campaign through Google AdWords, whereby Google users who entered certain search queries, such as “replacement napster,” “napster mp3,” “napster download,” “kazaa morpheus,” “mp3 free download,” and dozens of other phrases containing the words “napster,” “kazaa,” or “morpheus,” would see an advertisement leading them to the LimeWire website.

The next step in the case is a June 1 conference. Here’s LimeWire CEO George Searle’s statement, which doesn’t include a vow to appeal the ruling:

LimeWire strongly opposes the Court’s recent decision. LimeWire remains committed to developing innovative products and services for the end-user and to working with the entire music industry, including the major labels, to achieve this mission. We look forward to our June 1 meeting with Judge Wood.

And here’s the end-zone dance from Mitch Bainwol, CEO of the music industry’s lobbying group:

This definitive ruling is an extraordinary victory for the entire creative community. The court made clear that LimeWire was liable for inducing widespread copyright theft.

LimeWire is one of the largest remaining commercial peer-to-peer services. Unlike other P2P services that negotiated licenses, imposed filters or otherwise chose to discontinue their illegal conduct following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Grokster case, LimeWire instead thumbed its nose at the law and creators. The court’s decision is an important milestone in the creative community’s fight to reclaim the Internet as a platform for legitimate commerce. By finding LimeWire’s CEO personally liable, in addition to his company, the court has sent a clear signal to those who think they can devise and profit from a piracy scheme that will escape accountability.

We are gratified by the court’s careful and thorough analysis of the facts and applicable law.

Bigger question: What does this mean for the music industry? Assuming Wood’s ruling stands, this one will definitely feel good for the labels, and it would have been a very big deal had they lost. But it certainly won’t help them in fighting less formally organized P2P services or those set up outside the U.S.

Arista Records Summary Judgment Opinion

And we’re off! Court filings in the YouTube-Viacom suit were just unsealed and both sides are distributing them now.

This post will be a work in progress as I ingest the paperwork. I’ll link to places where you can sort through the files for yourself, and I’ll be posting what I can on this site as well. Most important, I’ll try to interpret the documents and pull out the most interesting stuff.

As we start, a reminder of what we’re looking at: Both sides are releasing their legal arguments and supporting evidence in the three-year-old case. In short, Viacom (VIA) says that Google’s (GOOG) video site infringed on its copyright and wants a billion dollars in damages; YouTube says the site is protected by federal law.

Slightly longer version: Viacom is arguing that YouTube is a giant version of Napster and Grokster, the music file-sharing sites knocked down in earlier court rulings. That makes it important for the cable network to show that YouTube executives knew users were uploading licensed work and that the executives were encouraging it.

YouTube, meanwhile, is arguing that the company has always tried to discourage users from uploading licensed stuff and has gone to great lengths to take down stuff that copyright owners don’t want there. The video service also argues that Viacom has uploaded plenty of its stuff to YouTube on its own and continues to do so. Key part of Google’s defense, in plain English:

Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube–and every Web platform–to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

It’s important to remember that all of this is already old news to the U.S. District Court judge who will rule in the case. While this may seem like a reality show, the public doesn’t get a vote on this one.

Now let’s get to the filings. Here is Viacom’s request for summary judgment, followed by its “statement of undisputed facts”–essentially supporting evidence. Viacom is also posting most of the documents and depositions here, though some items have been redacted.

Viacom Summary Judgment Motion –

Viacom Statement of Undisputed Facts –

And here’s a link to YouTube’s statement. The company’s legal memorandum follows:

20100318_google_viacom_youtube_memorandum

Below is a statement from YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, which amounts to a legal version of a press release. Note the many references he makes to his desire to keep the site free of copyrighted stuff–at least initially.

C Hurley Declaration –

In his memo, Hustinx criticizes the secrecy of the talks from which ACTA arose and worries that as an international treaty to fight digital piracy, the agreement is in danger of running afoul of European Union privacy and data protection law requirements.

“Privacy and data protection must be taken into account from the very beginning of the negotiations, not when the schemes and procedures have been defined and agreed and it is therefore too late to find alternative, privacy compliant solutions,” Hustinx wrote.

“While intellectual property is important to society and must be protected,” he added, “it should not be placed above individuals’ fundamental rights to privacy, data protection, and other rights such as presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.”

Evidently, that’s exactly where IP has been placed in the current draft of ACTA, which seems to be designed to encourage ISPs to monitor their customers’ Internet use for illegal file-sharing and potentially, to blackball repeat offenders on their networks.

“Insofar as the current draft of ACTA includes or at least indirectly pushes for three strikes Internet disconnection policies, ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the protection of personal data and privacy,” Hustinx wrote.

“The EDPS takes the view that three strikes Internet disconnection policies are not necessary to achieve the purpose of enforcing intellectual property rights,” he concluded. “The EDPS is convinced that alternative, less intrusive solutions exist or, at least, that the envisaged policies can be performed in a less intrusive manner or at a more limited scope, notably through the form of targeted ad hoc monitoring.”

Depends on who you ask, of course.

Executives at Veoh say Judge A. Howard Matz has given them a new lease on life, and at least some of the company’s investors are doing some chest-beating. Universal, the world’s largest music label, says it’s confident it will win an appeal.

You can get the same split opinion by asking two different companies that happen to be locked in a similar fight. Executives at Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, which is trying to fend off a copyright suit filed by Viacom (VIA), say the Veoh ruling bolsters their case. You can guess what Viacom says.

The gist of the fight: Universal says Veoh didn’t try hard enough to keep illegally uploaded material off the video site; Veoh says it made a good-faith effort. Matz agreed with Veoh and tossed out Universal’s claims.

Even if you disregard the posturing, it’s fair to say there’s a genuine debate over the ruling’s meaning. Veoh, along with some of my bloggy colleagues, is treating the decision as the final word on Web copyright disputes, or at least those that involve the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

And Matz certainly slapped Universal around. But it’s worth noting that copyright owners have lost Web cases in the Ninth District before, but ultimately won on appeal. Ask Grokster, the now-defunct file-sharing network that dissolved after a 2005 Supreme Court ruling.

You can read all of Matz’s judgment at the bottom of this post. But this excerpt, in which he argues that simply having illegal material on your site isn’t a crime, and neither is knowing about it (at least, in a general sense), gives you a good idea of Matz’s thrust and tone:

No doubt it is common knowledge that most websites that allow users to contribute material contain infringing items. If such general awareness were enough to raise a “red flag,” the DMCA safe harbor would not serve its purpose of “facilitat[ing] the robust development and world-wide expansion of electronic commerce, communications, research, development, and education in the digital age,” and “balanc[ing] the interests of content owners, on-line and other service providers, and information users in a way that will foster the continued development of electronic commerce and the growth of the Internet.”

Legal debate aside, the ruling does give a practical benefit for Veoh. It allows the company to fetch a higher price on the auction block.

CEO Dmitry Shapiro has been shopping the site to bidders over the summer, and as of a few months ago, he was willing to accept less than the $70 million investors like Time Warner (TWX), Goldman Sachs (GS) and former Disney (DIS) CEO Michael Eisner have poured into the site.

Selling a Web video site in 2009 is a tough challenge without a handicap, but the lawsuit was a big one. It was a huge time-and-money suck–Veoh may have spent as much as $6 million fighting the case in the last two years–and more important, the unresolved case was a huge liability. Who wants to buy a lawsuit?

Now, Shapiro says, Veoh’s options include not selling at all. He insists that some of Veoh’s existing backers are willing to recapitalize the company and that new investors might join in as well.

I’ll take him at his word, but if I had to bet, I’d wager that Veoh ends up getting acquired sooner than later. Maybe quite soon–the company has a board meeting today.

Wonder what they’ll talk about?

VEOH –

Still here? How about that? You get a bonus video! (But be warned: Pacino chews up a lot of scenery here, and there is some impassioned cursing.)

There are networked hard drives from several manufacturers that can back up both laptops wirelessly and allow sharing. One I reviewed recently is the My Book World Edition from Western Digital. Another approach would be to use a Web-based synchronization service. My favorite of these is called SugarSync, from a company called Sharpcast.

SugarSync can automatically, and almost instantly, synchronize files in folders you select among multiple computers, while also backing them up to a password-protected Web account. SugarSync starts at $5 a month or $50 a year for 30 gigabytes of files, and goes up in price based on the amount you use. The company offers a free two-gigabyte account and a free trial of larger accounts for 30 days. More information is at sharpcast.com.

I have been a Windows user for may years but have wanted to change to Mac. Yet every article I read says that Quicken, which I depend upon heavily, will not run—at least reliably—on a Mac, even with the Windows-compatible software. Is this true?

The native Quicken version for the Mac is a less capable program than the Windows version, and doesn’t use the same file format, which makes importing Windows Quicken files a tedious and imperfect process for many users. Intuit, the maker of Quicken, is promising a new, much better native Mac version early next year that it claims will solve these problems, but I haven’t tested it, so I can’t verify that pledge.

However, in tests I have run periodically, Quicken for Windows ran just fine on a Mac equipped to run Windows and Windows programs. This was true when I used either Parallels or Fusion, which allow you to run Windows programs on a Mac simultaneously with Mac programs; or when I used Boot Camp, which converts the Mac into a full-fledged Windows machine, with Apple’s operating system turned off.

I plan to get a new computer after Windows 7 is released in October, to replace my old Compaq running Windows XP. Will I have difficulty moving my files to the new one?

You shouldn’t have much difficulty with your personal data files. Microsoft is building in an Easy Transfer program to move personal files to a new Windows 7 PC. But the Microsoft program won’t move over your programs. You will have to reinstall all your programs, which means finding your installation disks or installer files and re-installing all the updates from that have occurred over the years. A company called LapLink is promising to sell software it says will automate the entire process, including moving programs, to spare you this re-installation burden. But it isn’t out yet, and I haven’t tested it with Windows 7.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.