This month, Limewire was found guilty of copyright infringement, a significant court ruling that changes the structure of peer-to-peer file sharing, and may signify the decline of the company. Last week, Limewire CEO George Searle told Billboard that despite the ruling, he hopes that record labels are still willing to work with his company.
“We’d made no secret about the fact that we want to work with the entire music industry,” Searle said. “We’ve had numerous promising meetings with labels, publishers and artists to develop models that will compensate all. We have very strong ideas about how to integrate relevant, contextual marketing into P2P networks. We’ve been thinking about this for a long time and would like to give it a shot. The industry has supported very little experimentation on trying to leverage distributed activity to everybody’s benefit. Ten years after Napster, we’re still wondering if there’s a real business here. So we’ve expressed our desire to license music and settle the P2P.”
However, music labels, publishers, and artists are extremely wary of cooperating with the entity, which still fails to acknowledge that over 98% of its shared material infringe on copyrights. “I’ve been in meetings where I ask a music executive in all earnestness, ‘How can I best help you?’ The knee-jerk response is, ‘Shut down LimeWire.’ It provides for an interesting discussion, because what’s going to happen if we do that? We’re building a revolutionary music service and we’d like to launch it smack dab on top of the P2P network. It’s got to be a better alternative.”
Searle said he hopes to also work with iTunes and other players to legally make accessible millions of music files through an entirely new model. As of now, there is little news from music labels on whether or not they would be willing to cooperate with Limewire on the matter.
