A US judge issued a "permanent injunction" late on Tuesday, ordering LimeWire to disable the "searching, downloading, uploading, file trading, and/or file distribution functionality" of the software it distributed to its 50 million monthly users to access and share files through the peer-to-peer service.
Following Tuesday's injunction, the Recording Industry Association of America said the injunction "will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that LimeWire and Mark Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely."
Founded in 2000 by Mark Gorton, a former Wall Street trader, LimeWire will appear in court in January, for a trial to determine the appropriate level of damages necessary to compensate the record companies for the billions and billions of illegal downloads that occurred through the LimeWire system."
According to RIAA figures, US recorded music sales fell to $7.7bn in 2009 from $14.5bn in 1999. The rise to prominence of peer-to-peer file sharing networks is singled out as a primary factor for this decline.
LimeWire now joins other high-profile file-sharing sites, namely Grokster and Napster, in being shut down through a lawsuit filed by entertainment companies.
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