Huge drop in US pirates
By Asha

For the tech savvy, LimeWire is a free peer to peer file sharing client.  For those searching for freebies, its site and software allowed people to easily download and share pirated music, movies and porn.

LimeWire.com was launched in 2000 and grew to one of the most visited sites around the world.  Their software was available in 31 languages. According to internet monitoring company Alexa, India was among the top 10 countries accessing LimeWire and provided about 3 percent of its traffic. The site claimed it has 50 million users a month.

In Oct 2010, after a number of legal battles with the RIAA who accused it of promoting piracy, LimeWire shuttered its services.

Just how much was LimeWire associated with piracy?  The NPD Group, a leading provider of reliable and comprehensive consumer and retail information for a wide range of industries, has worked out some figures

“
In late October 2010, LimeWire shuttered its file sharing services, months after a federal judge sided with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and found the peer-to-peer (P2P) service liable for copyright infringement. According to The NPD Group, the percentage of the U.S. Internet population using a P2P file-sharing service to download music has fallen from a high of 16 percent in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2007 to just 9 percent in Q4 2010 when Limewire ceased its file-sharing operations. The average number of music files downloaded from P2P networks also declined from 35 tracks per person in Q4 2007 to just 18 tracks in Q4 2010, although some downloaded just one or two tracks, while others took hundreds. NPD estimates there were 16 million P2P users downloading music in Q4 2010, which is 12 million fewer than in Q4 2007.

According to NPD's "Music Acquisition Monitor," Limewire was used by 56 percent of those using P2P services to download music in Q3 2010, but fell to just 32 percent in Q4 2010, since the P2P service was only available through October in Q4; however, other P2P site usage rose. Frostwire was used by just 10 percent of those sharing music files via P2P in Q3 2010, increasing to 21 percent in Q4 2010; Bittorrent client u-Torrent increased from 8 percent to 12 percent in the same time period.

"Limewire was so popular for music file trading, and for so long, that its closure has had a powerful and immediate effect on the number of people downloading music files from peer-to-peer services and curtailed the amount being swapped," said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD. "In the past, we've noted that hard-core peer-to-peer users would quickly move to other Web sites that offered illegal music file sharing. It will be interesting to see if services like Frostwire and Bittorrent take up the slack left by Limewire, or if peer-to-peer music downloaders instead move on to other modes of acquiring or listening to music."
“