LimeWire: Illegal or File Hosting?
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LimeWire itself is not illegal but it is predominantly used for illegal purposes. LimeWire realizes this and yet does nothing to prevent it and takes no action on those who use the program for illegal file sharing.
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No, the program itself is not illegal.
It's like people don't even bother reading the posts anymore. I mean, if they did, the thread would have closed about five minutes after it started. No, it's not illegal. For the most part, downloading something you're supposed to pay for without paying for it is illegal, and if you use LimeWire to do that, you're probably breaking the law. There's really not anything more to discuss, it's quite simply as I've put it.
Tamaki
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Like most filesharing programs, limewire isn't illegal, but is often used in ways which are illegal. Limewire doesn't promote or condone downloading protected content, but it happens.
I copied that off Yahoo answers... XD
And, aside from legal issues, I wouldn't use LimeWire if I were you, because it WILL give you a virus.
I copied that off Yahoo answers... XD
And, aside from legal issues, I wouldn't use LimeWire if I were you, because it WILL give you a virus.
Greene1516
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Firstly, it isn't illegal. It is a peer2peer based sharing system, that is that the files you download are coming from other people's machines.
On the other hand, even if it were illegal, that doesn't mean you have to take it down. Most downloading is illegal but really how many people do you know who have gotten pulled for it? How many authority figures outside of the companies have you heard that care? You get where I am going with this.
All that being said, I wouldn't download it anyway. P2P is notorius for virus spreading (especially trojans) and LimeWire is just bad at finding stuff anyway. Torrents are the way of the future.
Feign
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No Sweeden has more lax laws (hence the reason why ThePirateBay was not charged).
That's just for liability purposes ;)
--
On a funny side note, in Canada, it is legal to download/file share music and movies, but illegal to upload them.
Zakarii
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I think it's as illegal as any other music sharing site/program. Other resources being more illegal than others is just silly. I personally don't like Limewire, as my computer got a virus from it, so I switched to uTorrent. It's much faster and reliable.
Except it's indisputably not illegal software. You can use it for illegal purposes, but it's not illegal in itself.
DakeDesu
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Okay... and a few notes:
Tools themselves _generally_ are not illegal--if it is possible to use them for legal things. Limewire can be used to distribute music, programs, artwork, etc., legally--that is, if the artist says it is fine and alright for it to be on there. Similar with Bit Torrent. Generally most of what I get on Bit Torrent is either near impossible to find (making the "you're a pirate for not buying it" hold a little less weight), or is sometimes only provided vai Bit Torrent. Certain Linux distro ISOs come to mind (for example, some of the spins of the various Fedora)
The example of the machine gun being illegal is not an applical one in this case. As the machine gun is _only_ able to be used to kill things. Other guns, can be used for this purpose, but you need to look at what you are killing. A rifle, can be used for hunting animals for the purpose of killing. A machine gun however cannot.
An in UK, they were looking to make knifes illegal BTW ~.^
Myself, I am in Canada, where _providing_ pirated stuff is illegal. However simply having this stuff on your computer is not. As long as you are not letting others receive the pirated data from you, you are fine under Canadian copyright/trademark/patent law. I will also note that many American companies have expressed how much they disagree with Canadian copyright law, and have expressed interest in making Canada be recognised as a country similar to China or Russia as far as piracy is concerned.
I think that is China, Russia and Canada were to team up, USA would need to realise it would no longer be a real world power at that point. Well, between Russia's military technology, China' populace and... well Canada's Health Care System? (I am really stretching her for what Canada could provide ^.^)
I still find it silly when people automatically look at a torrent or ROM and say, "OMG! Illegal!"--it is really the same sort of thing people said when they say an MP3 a few years ago back when Napster first started up. I am sure many of you have plenty of _legal_ MP3s on your system. Or for the more intelligent of you Ogg/Vorbis or Flac files ~.^
As per it being virus infected--in today's day and age I'd be more worried about spyware. And most people who get a lot of spyware tend to be _really_ silly about what the install on their computer, or even the sites they go to. I am still surprised that I ended up with a version of Ice Ape (a Debian equivalent to Mozilla Seamonkey) being filled to the brim with spyware. Not because the program itself was a bad one (IIRC, I got it directly from the etch repos--which is nearly impossible to grab spyware/trojans from that). It got infected after I went to a myspace page that was vandalised by Anonymous (since it was obviously a raid, I am guessing Rules 1 and 2 apply, so check out Ebaums world ~.^). I dunno, I didn't have to worry as long as I didn't run Ice Ape (I still had Opera, IE5, IE5.5, IE6 and Ice Weasel available to go by), and I never really removed Ice Ape for a while, as well, the person did their job, and I was dumb enough to let them. I also found it hilarious that they managed to specifically target _every_ possible browser that could have gone to that vandalised myspace page. I was kind of proud.
So while Limewire may or may not be a trojan or spyware itself, it is likely very that many people using it, have no clue as to how to protect themselves from spyware stuff like those silly "next generation smiles" or "Evony".
Tools themselves _generally_ are not illegal--if it is possible to use them for legal things. Limewire can be used to distribute music, programs, artwork, etc., legally--that is, if the artist says it is fine and alright for it to be on there. Similar with Bit Torrent. Generally most of what I get on Bit Torrent is either near impossible to find (making the "you're a pirate for not buying it" hold a little less weight), or is sometimes only provided vai Bit Torrent. Certain Linux distro ISOs come to mind (for example, some of the spins of the various Fedora)
The example of the machine gun being illegal is not an applical one in this case. As the machine gun is _only_ able to be used to kill things. Other guns, can be used for this purpose, but you need to look at what you are killing. A rifle, can be used for hunting animals for the purpose of killing. A machine gun however cannot.
An in UK, they were looking to make knifes illegal BTW ~.^
Myself, I am in Canada, where _providing_ pirated stuff is illegal. However simply having this stuff on your computer is not. As long as you are not letting others receive the pirated data from you, you are fine under Canadian copyright/trademark/patent law. I will also note that many American companies have expressed how much they disagree with Canadian copyright law, and have expressed interest in making Canada be recognised as a country similar to China or Russia as far as piracy is concerned.
I think that is China, Russia and Canada were to team up, USA would need to realise it would no longer be a real world power at that point. Well, between Russia's military technology, China' populace and... well Canada's Health Care System? (I am really stretching her for what Canada could provide ^.^)
I still find it silly when people automatically look at a torrent or ROM and say, "OMG! Illegal!"--it is really the same sort of thing people said when they say an MP3 a few years ago back when Napster first started up. I am sure many of you have plenty of _legal_ MP3s on your system. Or for the more intelligent of you Ogg/Vorbis or Flac files ~.^
As per it being virus infected--in today's day and age I'd be more worried about spyware. And most people who get a lot of spyware tend to be _really_ silly about what the install on their computer, or even the sites they go to. I am still surprised that I ended up with a version of Ice Ape (a Debian equivalent to Mozilla Seamonkey) being filled to the brim with spyware. Not because the program itself was a bad one (IIRC, I got it directly from the etch repos--which is nearly impossible to grab spyware/trojans from that). It got infected after I went to a myspace page that was vandalised by Anonymous (since it was obviously a raid, I am guessing Rules 1 and 2 apply, so check out Ebaums world ~.^). I dunno, I didn't have to worry as long as I didn't run Ice Ape (I still had Opera, IE5, IE5.5, IE6 and Ice Weasel available to go by), and I never really removed Ice Ape for a while, as well, the person did their job, and I was dumb enough to let them. I also found it hilarious that they managed to specifically target _every_ possible browser that could have gone to that vandalised myspace page. I was kind of proud.
So while Limewire may or may not be a trojan or spyware itself, it is likely very that many people using it, have no clue as to how to protect themselves from spyware stuff like those silly "next generation smiles" or "Evony".
I can't think of any reason to use FLAC unless you're redistributing the audio. As for Vorbis, AAC is probably slightly better, and it has its open source implementations, too (though NeroDigitalAudio is probably the best free AAC encoder, tbh). Plus, it's more widely used.
Can we close this soon? The question's been answered about fifteen times by now.
sanny the hedgehog
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lime wire to me is like karma
its pretty much illegal but you get somthing from it
the bad side, pretty much every song has a virus on it
thats why i stopped using it
its pretty much illegal but you get somthing from it
the bad side, pretty much every song has a virus on it
thats why i stopped using it
Feign
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Most of the errors associated with that have to do with the amount of KB/MBs in the file.
Like files that are supposed to be 700mb are 1kb... It is easy to identify the culprit.
Also in Canada, the government had planed to ammend the copyright law (so much so that people were outcrying about it, because of it's strange strictness; no I am not sure on that detail, best to look it up), needless to say an election intervened and the issue was not brought up again.
DrCoolSanta
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I just wanted to point out, I read a few posts about reccommendations to the government to ban it. Personally I say, don't, let it be there. Internet is not the only source of pirated media, rather a bigger problem is the shops that sell cheap CDs.
Don't get me wrong, but the government can't take a good action when it comes to things like this and we know what they will do. Ban P2P, do we want that, P2P protocols are the only good file transfer protocols that is cheap and has less overhead and bandwidth etc.
Think of China, they are too bad with this, half of the things are blocked, almost no MMORPGs, no P2P. The internet is almost only for information there.
Discussions like this is where conflicts arise, because like DakeDesu, even I feel that there are something that you can almost never find in shops. It is hard to find movies that were released in 1990s in shops now so what do you do, download it off BT no? And then BitTorrent is a nice protocol, here is India, Internet is not cheap and I live in one of the remote areas (university campus). With BT, I get almost 1.5x the usual speed.
Ofcourse there are somethings only meant for the smart people, Limewire gives enough features for its users to recognise useless files but for soemone who is careless, its a big hazard.
Think of youtube, it has music, movies, TV episodes. A tonne of stuff you would call illegal, we all know that those files are easilly downloadable. Now tell me, do you think of YT to be illegal.
Don't get me wrong, but the government can't take a good action when it comes to things like this and we know what they will do. Ban P2P, do we want that, P2P protocols are the only good file transfer protocols that is cheap and has less overhead and bandwidth etc.
Think of China, they are too bad with this, half of the things are blocked, almost no MMORPGs, no P2P. The internet is almost only for information there.
Discussions like this is where conflicts arise, because like DakeDesu, even I feel that there are something that you can almost never find in shops. It is hard to find movies that were released in 1990s in shops now so what do you do, download it off BT no? And then BitTorrent is a nice protocol, here is India, Internet is not cheap and I live in one of the remote areas (university campus). With BT, I get almost 1.5x the usual speed.
Ofcourse there are somethings only meant for the smart people, Limewire gives enough features for its users to recognise useless files but for soemone who is careless, its a big hazard.
Think of youtube, it has music, movies, TV episodes. A tonne of stuff you would call illegal, we all know that those files are easilly downloadable. Now tell me, do you think of YT to be illegal.
beauty. proletariat
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Youtube is not illegal and no one in their right minds will ever make it illegal as there is literally no ground to it!
a) They actually check whats on the website and delete some stuff that breach copyright laws (some videos by nigahiga were deleted, I think one of them is "How to be a Ninja")
b) Youtube is owned by google; even if there are grounds to it, I doubt it will be an easy fight for any country to ban.
Back on topic of Limewire, If it is banned, there will be ways around it (China: http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=...passing+censorship+in+china&btnG=Search&meta=)
Limewire cannot be reasonably banned in all first world countries.
Why? Political system, freedom of speech, privacy etc. These all count and Australia is an excellent example of it. The government is having a hard time enforcing censorship laws for internet use.
Not only that, people all around the world will be against censorship if it hits any of the first world countries as it means a direct threat to them.
Europe, Japan, and Australia are going to be affected first anyway if censorship laws do come... the US is much too hard to tackle due to its checkered system with the states and whatnot.
Oh, most certainly Limewire should never be banned. Banning something for its potential to be illegal is a slippery slope. Limewire today, then what? Google, perhaps? You can certainly find illegal content on Google.