Facebook still hates P2P, pulls the pin on Limewire sharing integration

Earlier this year, The Pirate Bay debuted a nifty little feature that allowed users to post interesting torrents to their Facebook profiles. Zuckerberg's army scrambled quickly and put the kibosh on that interaction.

Limewire recently introduced a similar feature -- which Facebook has now given a swift whack with the banhammer. Limewire's Jason Herskowit told TorrentFreak that Facebook originally demanded a number of changes to the feature, and their developers complied.

A week later, and the Ministry of Facebook has decided that Limewire's integration is doubleplusungood and must be killed. According to the official Facebook statement, "Facebook respects the rights of copyright holders blah blah blah ad nauseum."

So let me get this clear: it's ok to form and join all kinds of hate groups, but you don't want us letting our friends know when we find an interesting download? That makes plenty of sense to me.

Yes, the general perception of Limewire and P2P users is that they're all after free music and stealing it willy-nilly through Bittorrent and Gnutella. However, there are plenty of legitimate uses. For example, Limewire's newer versions include private sharing for things like family photos that you want to keep semi-private.

Of course, Facebook probably doesn't want you notifying friends of your legitimate Limewire files either. They'd rather you upload those pics to their servers and tag the ever-loving crap out of them.

Pro tip: you can still just post links to taboo stuff like torrents manually - for now. Who knows, Facebook could be working on a massive blacklist so we can't even do that eventually.

[via TorrentFreak]

Tags: facebook, filesharing, limewire