A lot of buzz is surrounding Limewire lately and a question seems to be glued on everybody’s lips: is Limewire Illegal? Or, others, afraid of this I-word, are asking themselves if Limewire is Legal. Same thing, right? I guess now it’s time to find out, once and for all, if this little piece of software many people are using is legal or illegal.

To keep it short, the answer would be: “No, Limewire is not illegal”. However, the whole thing is not as simple as it might seem. Why?

Well, Limewire, the software itself, is a free peer-to-peer file sharing software that also has limited support for torrent files. In other words, people can directly share and download all sorts of files by using this program.

However, just like the Torrent downloading clients, this piece of software is not illegal: Limewire itself is not hosting or creating any illegal content, it only offers people the means to connect and download files. The terms of use also state that the users of the client are not allowed to share copyright protected materials. And this is where the problem occurs.

Sharing copyrighted material (music, movies, e-books and so on) is of course illegal and many (if not most) of the Limewire users transfer copyrighted material. Which is illegal. But if you stick to downloading and sharing files that are not copyrighted, you are not breaking any laws, because, as I said, Limewire itself is NOT illegal.