Music labels, including those owned by Warner Music Group Corp. and Sony Corp., settled their copyright lawsuit against Lime Wire LLC and its founder, Mark Gorton, for $105 million during the second week of a trial in New York.
“The case has just settled,” U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood told jurors Thursday.
Lawyers for both sides met throughout the day at the Manhattan courthouse. The defendants will pay a total of $105 million, according to e-mailed statements from the Recording Industry Association of America and Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, the law firm representing Lime Wire and Gorton.
During the trial, the music-label owners, which also included Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group and Citigroup Inc.’s EMI Group, sought more than $1 billion. The labels claimed Lime Wire and Gorton induced the infringement of copyrights on thousands of songs through peer-to-peer file-sharing software on the Internet. Wood ordered Lime Wire to shut down its music service last year.
Glenn Pomerantz, a lawyer for the music companies, told the jury of eight women and one man in opening statements May 3 that the record industry’s revenue fell 52 percent from 2000, the year Lime Wire was founded, to 2010.Gorton’s lawyers tried to convince the jury that other factors were responsible for the decline in industry revenue besides peer-to-peer, or P2P, file-sharing.
