LimeWire’s days as a major player on the P2P scene appear to be over. Judge Kimba Wood has issued an injunction forcing LimeWire to disable “the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality” of its software.

After years of litigation—the RIAA first sued LimeWire in 2006—Judge Wood ruled in the RIAA’s favor this past May. In granting the RIAA’s motion for summary judgment, she found that LimeWire was liable for inducing copyright infringement, despite asking users to affirm that they were not using the software for that purpose. The company didn’t help its case, as it made little to no effort to police infringement by its users via fingerprinting or content-filtering.

LimeWire had thoughts of going straight in August 2007, and planned to launch its own music store selling 256Kbps DRM-free tracks. Unsurprisingly, the labels weren’t willing to offer their wares on a service also known for warez.

Legal notice on the LimeWire homepage.

The P2P stalwart is still holding out hope of transforming into a legitimate destination for music, though. “While this is not our ideal path, we hope to work with the music industry in moving forward,” a LimeWire spokesperson told Ars. ”We look forward to embracing necessary changes and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future.” The spokesperson also noted that the company isn’t “shutting down,” but it will be using its “best efforts” to stop supporting and distributing P2P software and to ramp up filtering.

LimeWire now faces a January trial for damages, and the RIAA is looking forward to compensation for the “billions” of infringements that took place. “The court has now signed an injunction that will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that LimeWire and Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely,” an RIAA spokesperson told Ars. “In January, the court will conduct a trial to determine the  appropriate level of damages necessary to compensate the record companies for the billions and billions of illegal downloads that occurred through the LimeWire system.”

The injunction marks another victory in the RIAA’s campaign against file-sharing. As recently as two-and-a-half years ago, LimeWire was the most popular P2P app out there, and it’s still widely used. Disabling the functionality that file-sharers find useful will no doubt cause usage to bottom out, and some LimeWire users are likely to “go straight.” But there are numerous other places for the discerning pirate to find illicit content, including BitTorrent, private hubs, and Usenet. Big Content’s never-ending game of Whac-A-Mole continues.

The Pirate Bay

A series of attacks on The Pirate Bay, one of the most well known and controversial file-sharing websites has allowed a group of Argentinian hackers, headed by malware researcher Ch Russo, to access both the user database and the website administration panel of The Pirate Bay, comprising over 4 million usernames and email addresses in the process.

It is thought that the group first targeted the website administration panel on The Pirate Bay, the group succeeded and then employed a series of SQL injection vulnerabilities to gain access to the user database, where they were able to add and amend records and obtain information to identify trackers and torrents uploaded by specific users.

Ch Russo posted a cryptic message on his blog detailing reasons behind the attack:

As any other website, as any other system or mechanism, www.thepiratebay.org has robust parts and soft spots. We beleive that the people behind this comunity always acted with the local laws on their side, and so have we. The community caused problems to huge companies and corporations which turned into threats between this companies and them. What we have done, we did not do it with anger, or for commercial value. As always, we saw the change, the moment and decided to take it. The protocol or procedure done to achieve this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

As you can see, Russo acknowledges that the data would be of huge interest to anti-piracy groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). In a telephone interview with KrebsOnSecurity he said: “Probably these groups would be very interested in this information, but we are not [trying] to sell it,” adding “Instead we wanted to tell people that their information may not be so well protected.”

Screenshot of the backend of The Pirate Bay

According to Softpedia, the attackers have not been in contact with The Pirate Bay administrators since the attack but the offending weakness has since been identified and patched.