The court granted the plaintiffs’ request for summary judgment with respect to their
vicarious liability infringement claim. The court found substantial evidence that LimeWire had
the right and ability to limit the use of its product for infringing purposes, including by
implementing filtering, denying access and supervising regulating users. The court found that
LimeWire possessed a direct financial interest in the infringing activity of its users because
LimeWire profited from its ability to attract infringing users, including through increased
advertising revenue and increased sales of authorized music and an upgraded version of the
LimeWire client that users paid for. The court rejected LimeWire’s contention that because
LimeWire was capable of substantial non-infringing uses, LimeWire could not be liable for
vicarious infringement. The court found no case in which the Sony defense had been applied to
a claim of vicarious infringement liability.^2233
On Oct. 27, 2010, the court entered a stipulated permanent injunction that, among other
things, enjoined LimeWire from copying, reproducing, downloading, distributing, or making
available for distribution (by placing in a computer file or folder accessible by others for
downloading) any of the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and from displaying the source code for
the LimeWire client. LimeWire was required to use its best efforts to use all reasonable
technological means to prevent and inhibit future infringement of the plaintiff’s copyrighted
works by disabling the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and file distribution
functionality of legacy versions of the LimeWire client software, establishing default settings in
the legacy versions that blocked the sharing of unauthorized media titles, and providing all users
with a tool to uninstall the legacy versions. Before distributing any new version of the LimeWire
client, LimeWire was required to obtain the approval to do so from the plaintiffs and the
court.^2234 New versions of the client were required to incorporate a “Copyright Filter,” which
was defined as a “robust and secure means to exhaustively prevent” users from copying,
downloading, distributing or communicating to the public the plaintiff’s copyrighted works.^2235
The Copyright Filter was required to include the ability to filter both by text (i.e. artist and song
title) and by the use of “Fingerprinting Technology,” defined to mean “the most effective
available means of content-recognition filtering based on recognizing the unique content of an
underlying audio-visual work and detecting and preventing copying of that content no matter
how the file containing the content was created (e.g. whether the file was ripped from a CD,
DVD, or recorded from a radio or television, etc.), and which is available from commercial
vendors such as Audible Magic.”^2236
On Mar. 10, 2011, the court issued a ruling with respect to statutory damages to which
the plaintiffs were entitled.^2237 The plaintiffs argued that, because the defendants had been found
liable for inducing individuals to infringe their copyrights, they should be entitled to recover a
separate statutory award for each individual’s infringement of a work as to which they were
(^2233) Id. at 435-36.
(^2234) Arista Records LLC v. Lime Wire LLC, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 115675 at 21-24 (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 27, 2010).
(^2235) Id. at 20, 23.
(^2236) Id. at *20-21.
(^2237) Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC, 784 F. Supp. 2d 313 (S.D.N.Y. 2011).