LimeWire: From a $72 Trillion Lawsuit to Buying Fyre Festival

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The recording industry once demanded 72 trillion dollars in damages from a file sharing program, more than three times the gross domestic product of the planet at the time. The target was LimeWire, created in New York in 2000 by Mark Gorton. Written in Java, it ran on Windows, Mac, and Linux alike and connected users directly to one another over the Gnutella network. It also carried a heavy price. Around 30 percent of files on the network contained malware, and the free version once bundled a program called LimeShop that tracked shopping to collect affiliate commissions.

This episode is a biography of the software: its birth, its chaotic prime, its court-ordered death, and its strange afterlife. The 2005 Supreme Court ruling in MGM v. Grokster removed the defense that file sharing companies had relied on. Five years later a federal judge shut LimeWire down. What followed was an open source revolt, and then, two decades on, a revival that has little to do with music piracy.

• Most users ran the free version of LimeWire to pirate LimeWire Pro, the paid tier that cost about 35 dollars a year.
• A confusing sharing setup led people to expose whole hard drives, and in 2007 the Justice Department prosecuted an identity thief who simply searched the network for tax returns and bank statements.
• In October 2010 Judge Kimba Wood ordered all searching and downloading disabled, and the case settled in May 2011 for 105 million dollars.
• Weeks after the injunction, an anonymous developer called MetaPirate released LimeWire Pirate Edition, stripped of adware and with every Pro feature unlocked.
• Julian and Paul Zehetmayr bought the brand in 2022 for a music NFT marketplace, and in September 2025 the new LimeWire acquired the Fyre Festival name from Billy McFarland in an eBay auction.