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NFT: LimeWire relaunching as NFT marketplace after shutting down in 2010

Photo by: Tumisu/Pixabay

LimeWire is a known file-sharing company that was first launched in 2000, but after 10 years, it was forced to shut down by the court over copyright infringement concerning music piracy allegations. Now it is coming back but nothing like what it was before.

With the growing business related to cryptocurrency and non-fungible token or NFT, LimeWire is riding the waves and will be relaunching as an NFT marketplace. After more than a decade of being out of business, the company is ready to roll once again in the current digital era.

According to Bloomberg, LimeWire is being revived after Austrian brothers acquired the rights to the defunct music platform. The new owners do not have plans of overhauling the company's image but will instead make it better by selling music, artworks, and other content in the form of NFTs.

LimeWire was one of the earliest sources of music where people could download copies, and along the way, it has become a haven for illegal downloads, and this got the company in deep trouble. It had a lengthy legal battle with the Recording Industry Association of America due to music piracy and the court determined the platform brought about copyright infringement on a massive scale after attracting numerous online pirates.

The controversy eventually led to the closure of LimeWire, even if there was an out-of-court settlement between recording companies and the company's CEO at that time - Mark Gorton. This year, under new management, the platform will be operating as an NFT marketplace.

The businessmen Julian and Paul Zehetmayr purchased LimeWire's intellectual property and other assets last year. CNBC reported the service is set to debut in May and trading for NFTs and other virtual assets on the blockchain will begin.

The brothers shared that since their purchase, they have started working and planning to bring back LimeWire that has once been very popular, like Netflix and Spotify today. It was added that the platform will be listing prices in American dollars instead of cryptocurrencies and users will be allowed to buy tokens via credit cards.

"The issue with the NFT market is that most platforms are decentralized. If you look at bitcoin, all the exchanges are making it really easy to buy, trade, and sell bitcoin but there is no one really doing the same in the NFT space," Julian Zehetmayr told CNBC. "We have obviously got this great mainstream brand that everybody's nostalgic about and we thought we needed to build a real mainstream user experience as well."

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