Lime Wire Basic (the free version) is open source. This means that the source code can be downloaded. LimeWire Basic is released under the GNU General Public License, meaning you are free to do just about anything you want to with the software. Some freedoms include but are not limited to: distribute, make changes to, and use the software freely.

Lime Wire is used to download and share billions of files on the Gnutella network. Lime Wire is widely known as a way to get music. Although you can share many other types of files such as: video, doctuments, and software. Lime Wire has a built in "junk filter" which attempts to filter out fake and irrelative results. Viruses can still get through when searching for Software; so it's always a great idea to have some sort of virus protection installed.

On the official Lime Wire website, they promise:

• Protection against identity theft.
• Better control over shared files.
• No bundled software of any kind.
• Firewall to firewall transfers.
• Faster network connections.
• iTunes interegation.
• Creative commons interegation.
• Proxy support

I, personally haven't tested each one of these but I have full trust in the Lime Wire development team that these features work 100%.

Lime Wire is built in Java, meaning it can be used on any operating system that can run the Java virtual machine. Lime Wire provides installers for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Lime Wire is the most widely used Gnutella protocol. If you're interested in downloading Lime Wire just visit Limewire.com

It is important for our kids to know what is right (not what is legal, there are many things that although legal, not for a teenager to do) and most importantly for them to acknowledge why certain things are not allowed in our communities. I was at a concert last weekend and I saw five girls that were no older than 13 smoking marijuana altogether as if it was no big deal. The problem is not that their smoking marijuana, the problem lays that they have no idea why they are doing it, and their parents (for a number of reasons – Unknown) have not explained them why this is wrong, and how to avoid it, or what to say to somebody when this happens.

I wanted to approach the issue of awareness before I got into our main concern, which is that the college kids who are stealing music and movies from this companies are mostly aware that it is a felony and that it’s not ethical, they still somehow do these things, why? Because most Americans are meant to believe that we have a right for everything: right to vote, free speech, free will, and many others that we all well aware about. So naturally, all college students believe they have a right to “music” which they do, but what they do not have a right to is to steal it.

The personal approach that should be used to make this students aware of their wrong doing is the Full Potential Approach which basically goes as follows: People are responsible for realizing their full potential within the confines of morality. Choices that can achieve this goal without infringing on the rights of others are considered ethical. Based upon this definition we may conclude that they are stealing from the Artists or the Film Company without no logical explanation but self-gratification.  The most professional way of dealing with these problems in a college campus environment is to encourage students not to download illegal material, invite companies that offer legal services into campus to relate with students, make music and films available for those who are consumers of this material in the university. Most part of this issue is still of individual concern and every person can do what they feel as right or even what they want, for some its worth the risk and for some its not. Some large institutions take part into this to not get attacked by the media or the corporations, and some choose to ignore the issues.

The unauthorized file sharing will be a large issue for many years and will always be present in some way, there are many ways of dealing with it previously mentioned on this report and it can lead to many major problems like lawsuits, scandals, unwanted media attention and more. But the main reason why this happens is because the students choose to go on the wrong path for lack of knowledge of a better or alternative path, and this is where awareness becomes the most important part of the issue. 

Similar to most other communication breakthroughs before it, the initial media and popular reaction to the Internet has been mostly negative. For example, it has been described as “awash in pornography,” and as making people “sad and lonely.” Yet, counter to the initial claim that Internet use causes depression and social isolation, the body of evidence is mainly to the contrary. It is argued that like the telephone and television before it, the Internet by itself is not a main-effect cause of anything. Research in psychology investigates how social identity, social interaction, and relationship formation may be different on the Internet than in real life.

File sharing is emerging as an important use of the Internet. The widely-recognized peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications (e.g., Napster, Kazaa, and Emule) have gained their reputation due to the large number of people using them and because of the public controversy that has been created about whether or not their use is legal. They also have a similar impact in the research community. File-sharing applications have demonstrated that from basic peer-to-peer interactions, it is possible to dynamically create social networks within which people can collaborate by sharing and retrieving information.

Because of the popularity of Napster and its successors (Gnutella, Kazaa, Morpheus, and E-Donkey), file sharing has become the killer P2P application. Gnutella addressed Napster's shortfall of complete decentralization, but its unstructured nature raised concerns over its search mechanism's efficiency and scalability. In 2001, P2P applications started to use superpeers (a set of more powerful nodes in a heterogeneous network) to transform the existing flat topology of these networks into a hierarchical one. Superpeers are considered faster and more reliable than normal peers and take on server-like responsibilities. For example, in the case of file sharing, a superpeer builds an index of the files shared by its client peers and participates in the search protocol on their behalf. This improves scalability by limiting the flood of search traffic. The most successful peer-to-peer application appears to be BitTorrent.

In BitTorrent, groups of peers with the same interest in downloading a specific files cooperate to accelerate the process. Essentially, a tracker node stores a list of peers in the group, thus letting new peers join. Each peer stores pieces of the file. Cooperating peers download and upload required pieces. If a peer stops uploading, other peers will likely block it; that is, they stop uploading to it. This implements the tit-for-tat-like process. Seeders, peers that store the whole file, are crucial to a group's functioning. If a group contains no seeders, eventually some pieces of the file might be completely missing from the group. Because peers gain nothing themselves by being seeders, the system requires some altruistic behavior from peers. This requirement is reflected by the mantra often repeated on BitTorrent Web sites: leave your download running for a little while after you've got the entire file.

So, you're the big kid on the block. You win through intimidation. You're a bully. You sue people for downloading songs off the internet. Rich people, poor people... it doesn't matter. You want to make an example of anyone and everyone that would dare "steal" from you.

But, just like most bullies, you're dumb. You're so self-centered and self-absorbed that you fail to see how simple a resolution to this issue really is. As I'm driving in my car, I flip from radio station to radio station, listening to whatever I want (well, ok, whatever station I want but what I actually listen to is limited to what is being played). Anyway, the point is this... I'm not paying for it. It's free to me. Why? Because of advertising.

So, here's what you do: Get Napster, Microsoft, Apple or anyone to create a sharing website. You put every song ever created on that website for people to download whatever/whenever they want. All for free. And everyone is happy. Oh wait, I forgot the most important part, money. Ok, easy enough. One word. Advertising. To download a song, you sit through a 30 second audio or video ad. When the ad is done playing, you give the person downloading 15 seconds to click the continue button to start the download. The download finishes and another page comes up that says "this download sponsored by" with a "return to search page" button.

Wait, it gets even better the advertising prices are based on number of downloads. For instance, if Garth Brooks comes out with a new album with a monster song and everyone wants to download it the cost to advertise at that spot is the highest. Do that for the top 10 downloaded songs. 11-20 would be a set rate. 21-50 would be another rate. So on and so forth. The more a song is downloaded, the higher the advertising rate.

You could even allow album downloads. Simply make the person downloading sit through a 2 or 3 minute block of "commercials" before the download starts. Track the album downloads the same way you do "singles" and assign a value to the 1 album download and go down from there.

What smart business wouldn't want in on that? I'm sure the advertising rates would be cheaper than on TV and you'd get a guaranteed number of people seeing your advertising. Remember if the user doesn't watch the ad and click the "continue" button, they get redirected back to their previous page. Nobody could skip out on watching the ads. But, because it would be free for the user (the fan) they would have no reason not to watch the ads.

How come nobody has thought of this? Maybe if the idiots trying to sue everyone (but only catching a very small portion of the people illegally downloading) would wake up and try to solve the problem instead of throwing lawsuits at it, everyone actually could be happy.

So, what do you say? Sound like a plan? Would you watch a 30 second ad to download whatever song you want... for free? Would you watch 6 commercials to download an entire album? I sure would. I'd have every song I'd ever wanted and I'd watch all the commercials I had to. I already watch ads on TV so this would be nothing.

I'm sure this is just a dream of mine. I can't imagine anyone in the music industry would actually do something like this. But, hey, at least I'm thinking about a solution instead being a bully and suing everyone.

One of the biggest problems are providers that that perform traffic shaping on P2P protocols, see avoid traffic shaping on how to counter that. You'll need that if your ISP is listed with an encryption level greater than 0 or a question mark on the Bad ISP list.

Hopefully your ISP will not have an encryption level other than 0. Use that list to see if your ISP does anything to throttle Bittorrent speeds.

Cablevision's Optimum Online, for example, prevents seeding on Bittorrent. Seeding is the uploading of torrent data to other people. Seeding is essential, because people with higher seeding speeds are more likely to have faster download (leech) speeds since more peers (other computers) are likely to connect and mutually transfer torrent data. Therefore, people using Optimum Online will have slower download speeds in Bittorrent.

Luckily, there is something you can do. Azureus recommends to try enabling Tools -> Options -> Transfer -> Use lazy bitfield or try encryption otherwise .

For that reason there has been decided to a default judgment cut down. This means that the demands of the accuser are completely assigned, provided that these are reasonable. An expert that speaks on behalf of the record companies has the opinion that the women had downloaded from the internet more than two hundred copyright protected music files during 2005. The accompanying Copyright Act-legislation reports that per copyrighted work at most 150,000 dollars damage may be calculated, through which the total fines could increase to a total amount of 30 million dollars. The judge reported that the choice for a default judgment is not only intended to hold back the accused party of destroying evidence in the future. The penalty will also set a positive example to people who would ever consider escaping punishment by destroying evidence.