Limewire: The Rise and Fall of File Sharing When I was in middle school, the biggest way to get music for free was a website named Limewire. Nothing was more exciting than to be able to hear a song on the radio then go home and download it to our desktops. Also cool, was the fact that if one of us didn’t have a song, our friend could simply “burn” it onto a c.d. for us. That was the only way we knew how to get music, aside from going out and buying the whole album. Apple’s iTunes was just starting out and iPods were just being created. Limewire was the way to go. Little did we know that Limewire was illegal and costing singers, songwriters, labels, and everyone associated with just one song, huge amounts of money. Limewire was created in the spring of 2000. While Limewire seemed to go unnoticed for a while by the big wigs, when the site gained traction and became popular, those big wigs at the labels started to pay attention. In a 2003, South Carolina Senator, Lindsey Graham, along with five other influential senators, sent a letter asking for “voluntary actions that will help reduce illegal file sharing on the networks”, to the CEO’s of the top P2P sites including P2P United. P2P United was a lobbying firm that represented Limewire at the time. Sen. Graham also stated in the letter, that the companies “have a legal and moral obligation to conform to copyright laws.” In rebuttal to the bi-partisan letter, P2P United executive, Adam Eisgrau said “Death for P2P business is clearly the objective of industries that see themselves in competition technologically with what peer-to-peer software can do.” From then on, he did not comment on the lawmaker’s requests. In late 2003, the RIAA filed lawsuits against more than 300 peer-to-peer site users and then again in January 2004, filing some 532 more suits. Suing 3,429 file sharers, the record labels claimed