RIAA Now Blames Journalists For Piracy... Sum up. RIAA Misfires, Grazes PCMag.com. The music industry has gone off the deep end. Now they want to lay the blame for music piracy on PCMag.com's doorstep. Seriously, over a dozen music industry execs signed a letter stating, "PC Magazine is encouraging" people to steal music. Allow me to explain. Some weeks ago PCMag.com covered the legal imbroglio surrounding popular P2P site Limewire. Recently, our CEO Vivek Shah received a letter from music industry execs (I was CC'ed), which was subsequently posted on Billboard.com.
That's nonsense. We wanted to send a direct response to the letter writers, but they failed to include a return address. The execs also call out coverage, found elsewhere online, of Limewire's resurrection and think the act of linking to any P2P service is damning in and of itself. Let me be clear, the music industry's charges remain groundless. The letter goes on to suggest PCMag.com retract the article (we won't). It worries me that the music industry took this action, because it reeks of desperation.
The controversed article. The legal battles plaguing the LimeWire P2P service finally took their toll Tuesday when Lime Wire announced that it has blocked the LimeWire service from the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. Lime Wire was ordered by the court to disable the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality of LimeWire's P2P file-sharing software. Visitors to the site are now met with a legal notice that notifies them of the shutdown. The move has left many users in search of an alternative to LimeWire. What other P2P sites are available? While there are countless options available, we polled the PCMag staff and put together a list of several alternatives for BitTorrent, Gnutella, and beyond.
All of these services should be used for legal downloads, of course; PCMag does not condone the download of copyrighted or illegal material. With that in mind, here are few sites that might help with the LimeWire withdrawal.