Given years of smug certainty among techies that sue-em-all was a mistake, how come suing em all seems to be working out pretty well?
suing consumers didn’t work, but suing businesses did. Unlicensed companies have been forced out of business or forced to license. Those which do license come out with new products, and consumers are going where the products are.
Limewire’s software will certainly survive legal annihilation because it is open source, but it will lose the casual users who rely on the quality level that Limewire the company has been providing. Sites that host the source code will hold their noses and take it down when they get credible lawsuit threats; then even developers will miss the polish, since the source repositories will have to be hosted on private servers or in the gray market.
In the end anybody who can be upsold to a licensed music source will be. The only people who stick to filesharing will be those who are too broke to pay and don’t care about the unpleasantness of life in the gray market. People with a few bucks will surely cough them up. Sue Em All has turned out to be a method of price discrimination, leaving the black market running but limited to the poor!