The end of Lime Wire as it has existed for years appears to be at hand.

U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood issued an injunction today against the company that operates the long popular file-sharing software, LimeWire, and requires managers there to disable "the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading...and/or all functionality" of the LimeWire software, Lime Wire announced.

In May, Wood, who serves the Southern District of New York, granted summary judgment in favor of the music industry's claims that Lime Group, parent of LimeWire software maker Lime Wire, and founder Mark Gorton committed copyright infringement, engaged in unfair competition, and induced copyright infringement.

LimeWire, the software, was released 10 years ago and quickly emerged as one of the favorite ways to pass pirated music across the Web. Gorton and his company have acknowledged making millions from offering the software.

"The court has now signed an injunction that will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that Lime Wire and Gorton used to enrich themselves."

--RIAA

"While this is not our ideal path, we hope to work with the music industry in moving forward," said a Lime Wire spokesperson in a statement. "We look forward to embracing necessary changes and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future."

Lime Wire continues to exist but no longer operates as a file-sharing service, the spokesperson said. Exactly what the New York-based company will do in the future is unclear. At this point, the company's chances of licensing music for Spoon appear to be small and its prospects dim.

Legacy software
Obviously, there is little that the court can do about software that is already released. But in her order, Wood tried to close the door on any further releases, upgrades, advertising of the software or the creation of any comparable software in the future. She also wants Lime Wire to do its best to discourage the use of the LimeWire software already in the wild, what she called "legacy software."

"Using its best efforts," Wood wrote, "Lime Wire shall use all reasonable technological means to immediately cease and desist the current infringement of the Copyrighted Works by Legacy users through the LimeWire System and Software and to prevent and inhibit future infringement of copyright works."

She ordered Gorton and employees to establish "default settings in the legacy software that block the sharing of unauthorized media files" and offer users tools to remove the software from their hard drives. Wood ordered Lime Wire to create a copyright filter that would work on legacy software. In addition, Wood required Gorton and crew to first get the permission of the music labels before building any new legal version of LimeWire.

However Lime Wire disables their client, there are plenty of alternative file-sharing software and networks available. Indeed, BitTorrent has emerged over the last few years as a much more popular way to share files.

Spoon
But for Gorton, the injunction is not the end of his or his company's troubles. The Recording Industry Association of America, which filed the copyright complaint against Gorton and Lime Wire in 2007, will now seek damages that could easily top $1 billion. That phase of the trial is scheduled to begin in January. A group of music publishers has also filed a copyright complaint against Lime Wire.

According to music industry sources, Gorton and the Recording Industry Association of America were in settlement negotiations for a long time as the judge deliberated over whether to impose the injunction.

Gorton offered to license music from the top four record companies for Spoon, Lime Wire's little-known legal music service. The deal fell through after Gorton's lawyers insisted that the music labels allow LimeWire to continue to operate for a year so users could be moved over to Spoon.

The labels totally rejected the idea. RIAA lawyers have told the judge that LimeWire costs the record labels about $500 million in lost music sales every month. They wouldn't wait a year. They wouldn't wait a month. They assert they have taken a beating from Lime Wire for too long.

"For the better part of the last decade, Limewire and Gorton have violated the law," the RIAA said in a statement. "The court has now signed an injunction that will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that Lime Wire and Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely."

Originally posted at Media Maverick

As you probably know, the iPhone and iPod Touch make terrific video players--but they're limited in terms of the video formats they support. If you've got, say, Divx or MKV files you want to watch, you're out of luck unless you run them through a converter first--a time-consuming hassle, to say the least.

Last month, the VLC Media Player app for iPad enabled users to work around this limitation by playing virtually all video formats, no conversion required.

I'm happy to report that VLC just went universal, meaning it's now available for iPhone and iPod Touch as well. (Specifically, it's compatible with the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and "recent" iPod Touches--which appears to mean third- and fourth-gen models.)

As with the iPad version, you copy videos to the app by way of iTunes' File Sharing feature: connect your device, click the Apps tab, scroll down to the File Sharing area, and then choose VLC. Click the Add button and find the video(s) you want to load up. They sync instantly (and quickly).

The app itself is pretty basic, offering little more than basic shuttle controls. It lacks a zoom-to-full-screen button like you find in most video players, but at least this updated version does allow you to delete videos right on your device, rather than having to manage them within iTunes.

I threw all kinds of videos at VLC, and it played each one without a hiccup. Your mileage may vary, especially with more obscure file formats, but I think it's a safe bet that if you want to watch a video--any video--on your late-model iPhone or Touch, this should do the trick.

Amazingly enough, VLC is free.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

As an Evernote user on several platforms (Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, Android, Web), I've always felt as if the software has had a Jekyll-and-Hyde divide between its offering on the Mac and PC. The Mac version ran better, and had a more consistent interface, while the PC version looked and ran like it had been pieced together out of spare parts.

Luckily, that's about to change.

Evernote is set to release a new version of its note-taking and Web-clipping Windows software this morning that improves speed, looks, and functionality. In short, it leapfrogs the old version, and then some.

The biggest change you'll see up front in Version 4.0 is that the interface has been given a thorough overhaul. Central navigation items that once took up two rows now take up one. It's the same story for the side bar, which contains your list of notebooks, tags, attributes, and saved searches; these items now take up less vertical space, letting you see more on laptops where your screen real estate may be limited.

Along with the app's core navigation, the editing interface--where users spend most of their time composing, has been thoughtfully trimmed down. The formatting menu is identical, but v4 gives the buttons a uniform look, as well as ditches the tagging and source URL options, which previously could not be minimized. This change gives you a considerable boost in workspace--especially if you're working in full screen.

But looks are one thing--it's the speed where you can really tell a difference. The application now launches almost immediately, even on some legacy hardware. It also takes up less memory, which in some casual testing was about five times less than the previous version with one note opened and in edit mode. Even more impressive is the built-in search tool, which now provides instantaneous results. Just these three things right here make the software much more enjoyable to use, whether you keep it running all day, or simply want to fire it up to find something you wrote or clipped a long time ago.

Windows 7 users also get a few perks, including support for Windows Jump Lists and automatic geolocation detection. This geolocation item is particularly neat, as with the old version you'd have to manually plug in your latitude, longitude, and altitude. Now, you can click a button and it taps into your computer's coordinates, or whatever home position you've plugged in as the default. It's also nice to have Jump List support, as it means no more fumbling to find Evernote's task tray icon to do something like clip a screenshot, or start a new note.

Earlier this month Evernote picked up $20 million in a Series C round of financing, led by Sequoia Capital. The company now has 4.7 million users, and is available on eight different platforms including its browser interface. Its last major interface overhaul on Windows came in September 2009, and brought some of the features and functionality over from the company's Mac version.

Version 4 of Evernote will not show up as an automatic update for all users of v3.5 in the next few days. But if you're itching to get your hands on it today, you can simply download the new version directly from Evernote.

Originally posted at Web Crawler