Entertainment Industry Propaganda Campaign Against Limewire Fails; FTC Drops ID Fraud Investigation

from the so-much-for-that dept

Mon, Aug 30th 2010 2:43am — Mike Masnick

While Limewire is facing a difficult future after losing its lawsuit to the major record labels, the company was also the target of a ridiculous propaganda campaign over the years, orchestrated by a few entertainment industry organizations, which tried to connect Limewire to identity fraud, by claiming that people were putting personal data into shared folders... and this was somehow Limewire's fault. Either way, the FTC stepped in to investigate and has now dropped the investigation, saying that, while the company could still do a better job educating users on how not to inadvertently share information, it didn't see anything that was actionable against Limewire.

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Filed Under: id fraud, limewire
Companies: ftc, limewire

6 Comments

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abc gum, 30 Aug 2010 @ 5:31am

"... people were putting personal data into shared folders ... could still do a better job educating users on how not to inadvertently share information"

Where is Microsoft in all this?
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- Berenerd (profile), 30 Aug 2010 @ 6:01am
  
  Re:
  Why would MS have anything to do with this? The "Shared Folder" they speak of is the one you setup when you set up limewire. It asks you where the folder you want to share is and or files and you point it to it. i think by default it points to your download folder. MS has nothing to do with that other than being the OS limewire is installed on. (Don't think its available in MAC and *nix installs.
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- Anonymous Coward, 30 Aug 2010 @ 7:30am
  
  Re:
  Microsoft is busy suing people over patents.
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Wolfy, 30 Aug 2010 @ 5:35am

It seems that Microsoft doesn't have a dog in this particular fight. Perhaps that's why they're so mum on this one.
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Christopher (profile), 30 Aug 2010 @ 8:43am

Well, everyone knew this
At first, years ago, Limewire shared your WHOLE ENTIRE HARD DRIVE! After complaints, the last 7 years or so, Limewire has only defaulted to sharing your music, pictures and downloads directory by default. Not even your My Documents directory in Windows!

So, I don't understand why people are blaming Limewire for this when they fixed the problem YEARS ago.
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sprearson81 (profile), 10 Jun 2012 @ 8:35am

When isn't Microsoft busy suing people?
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