File Sharing Timeline

By wmeadow

  • A trademark claiming the name Shareaza is filled by Discordia Ltd.

  • TorrentSpy shuts down citing hostile legal climate

  • Demonoid comes back online.

  • Freenet Darknet rewrite is released.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_(file_sharing)

  • TorrentSpy is ordered to pay $110 million in damages by US court.

  • Italy prevents their citizens from accessing The Pirate Bay and forwards their traffic to IFPI instead.

  • An appeal by The Pirate Bay's lawyers succeeds in lifting the Italian ban.

  • Morpheus website taken down; client is no longer available.

  • A Danish court rules that ISPs must block access to the website The Pirate Bay.

  • ShareReactor is reopened by The Pirate Bay.

  • The RIAA claims to have ended its P2P litigation campaign against individuals in the U.S., which had been losing money, in favor of a three strikes campaign. However, some new lawsuits continued to be filed.

  • The Pirate Bay trial starts

  • OneSwarm is released.

  • The Pirate Bay trial concludes with a guilty verdict; each defendant is sentenced to one year in jail and a total of 30 million SEK (3.6 million USD, 2.7 million EUR) in fines and damages. The people behind The Pirate Bay declare they will appeal the ruli

  • Legal fees in record industry lawsuits cause SeeqPod to sell its technology; the site closes until it finds a buyer.

  • In the retrial of the 2007 Capitol v. Thomas case, a jury again finds in favor of the plaintiffs, and awards statutory damages of $80,000 per song, for a total of $1.92 million.

  • Swedish gaming company Global Gaming Factory says it has an interest in purchasing The Pirate Bay. Global Gaming factory eventually lose funding to do so. (GGF)

  • Demonoid experiences hardware damage from power outages causing a three month downtime.

  • GGF fails to produce the funds to purchase The Pirate Bay and the deal is put to an end.

  • Mininova has removed torrents to all copyrighted content that it does not have official agreements for.

  • BtChina and about 530 other sites registered in China were closed down.

  • Demonoid is back online.

  • US federal court judge Kimba Wood issued an injunction forcing LimeWire to prevent "the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality" of its software (see Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group

  • First release of a modified version of LimeWire Pro with all undesirable components removed (such as ad- and spyware, as well as dependencies to LimeWire LLC servers) under the name of "LimeWire Pirate Edition", enabling access to all advanced features of

  • The verdict in The Pirate Bay trial was announced. The appeal court shortened sentences of three of the defendants who appeared in court that day. Neij's sentence was reduced to 10 months, Sunde's to eight, and Lundström's to four. However, the fine was i

  • LimeWire Pro source code ("Pirate Edition") released at SourceForge.net under the name WireShare.

    LimeWire Pro source code ("Pirate Edition") released at SourceForge.net under the name WireShare.