Limewire Owner interviewed

One of the most closely watched U.S. Supreme Court cases this spring was MGM v. Grokster. In it, the Court heard arguments on whether Grokster and other makers of software used to share music and video files over the Internet should be shut down because of users' illegal copying of copyrighted material. Aerospace engineer turned Wall Street options trader Mark Gorton runs Lime Wire, maker of the popular file-sharing program LimeWire. He spoke to TR late this spring about the pending ruling.

Downloads of LimeWire software are running well over a million copies a week. The legal threat isn't hurting the file-sharing business?
I doubt most of our users even think about it.

The music industry certainly does.
They need to get over it. Look at the history: every time there's a technological innovation, someone says the sky is falling. But it never does. The way the music business makes money today is different from what it will be 10 years from now, but that's not unhealthy.

But don't they say that 90 percent of file-sharing traffic is pirated?
I don't see copyright infringement as a discrete issue. File sharing is a net good for society. It lowers the cost of distributing music. The fact that practically everything that's ever been recorded is now available at everyone's fingertips is amazing. When I tell people I run an options-trading company, their eyes glaze over. When I tell them I do LimeWire, they get excited.

Even if the record companies lose this battle, won't they still go after individual downloaders?
They have the right to file 10 million lawsuits. Whether they have the societal backing to do that is another question. If 20 kids on every campus in America are being sued, will there still be public support for more-stringent copyright law? But it's not just political calculation: these are their customers.

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