The Lime Group and its executive officers, developers of the LimeWire P2P file sharing software, were sued by the major record labels, including Sony BMG, Virgin Records and Warner Bros. Records, for copyright infringement. LimeWire was one of several recipients of a cease and desist letter sent last year to P2P companies. The company had been in discussions with RIAA to install filtering software in its software.

LimeWire was started in 2000. It is the largest exclusive P2P developer for the Gnutella P2P network. Gnutella was the first popular P2P network after the original Napster was shut down and popularized a distributed architecture that used no central server. LimeWire has been downloaded by hundreds of millions of users. It is regularly one of the top weekly downloads at download.com, which reports 20 million total downloads. LimeWire is noted for having both Windows and Mac versions and opening up its source code to other developers.