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It appears as though a recent court decision forcing LimeWire to halt its P2P services is having a ripple effect to other parts of the company, as All Things Digital reports the site is closing its online music store at the end of the year and is abandoning its plans for a legal music download service.

The news wasn't good for LimeWire back in October when a U.S. District Court judge issued an injunction, forcing the P2P filesharing site to close down both the website and its client. And arguably, things went from bad to worse when a figure named MetaPirate took advantage of the open-source code for the client and recreated a Pirate Edition of LimeWire, causing both the RIAA as well as LimeWire to scramble to track him down. Those meddling kids.

With the news of Pirate Bay convictions upheld in Sweden, website seizures in the U.S., and now threats to "do something" about Wikileaks, it's no surprise that there are now calls for an alternative DNS, one outside the reach of governments and of ICANN.

The DNS, or Domain Name System, is one of the foundational elements of the Internet, responsible for translating the numbers in IP addresses to the more human-friendly names. And ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a nonprofit organization tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Protocol address spaces, maintaining the registries of IP identifiers, and managing top-level domain names.

The verdict against three people assoiated with the BitTorrent tracking site Pirate Bay was upheld by the Swedish Appeal Court today. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström were found guilty of "contributory copyright infringment" in April, but the group appealed the sentence - which included one year in prison and a sizable fine. Today's ruling upheld that conviction, decreasing the length of the prison sentence, but increasing the damages that the trio will have to pay to more than $6.5 million.

Two weeks after the injunction against LimeWire in late October that forced the P2P filesharing site's closure, a "horde of piratical monkeys" revived the LimeWire codebase and moniker, launching the LimeWire Pirate Edition. This version operated on its own servers, but since it shares the LimeWire name, the RIAA now contends that this new site means that LimeWire has violated the court-ordered closure.

And now both the RIAA and LimeWire are the trail of "MetaPirate," the person responsible for the Pirate Edition.

Sandvine's Fall 2010 report on global Internet trends gives a glimpse into Internet usage in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. In addition to examining geographic differences, the report also points out some of the differences between mobile and "fixed" usage, it also makes clear that, "To subscribers, the Internet is the Internet, whether it's accessed through a wire or over wireless spectrum."

Although there are certainly variations between regions, some of the trends the report finds are global: Real-time entertainment dominates data consumption on both mobile and fixed networks worldwide, constituting about 43% of total Internet traffic. And social networking services make up a significant and growing percentage of mobile Internet traffic, doubling in Latin America just over the last eight months.

Less than a week since LimeWire was ordered to shut down its operations, almost all other major file-sharing applications are reporting a massive increase in downloads, arguably from those displaced LimeWire users.

A New York district judge last Tuesday issued a cease-and-desist order, demanding that LimeWire immediately close its doors. And while LimeWire has said it has plans to institute a redesigned service, based on legal and licensed music subscriptions, it seems like many of the site's users may have gone elsewhere for their torrents, rather than waiting for a revised version of what was once the most popular file-sharing app.

In a major victory for record labels and a major bummer for P2P file-sharers, the Gnutella-based download client LimeWire has been ordered to immediately stop distributing and supporting its software. U.S District Judge Kimba Wood handed down a 17-page permanent injunction today, and an announcement on the Limewire site shutters the site and the client no longer functions.

Judge Wood found earlier this year that Limewire had knowingly participated in copyright infringement "on a massive scale" after the RIAA, along with several major record labels, brought suit against the company. And while the RIAA wanted the site shut down then, Limewire was given a reprieve to build a new copyright-friendly technology.

"Some of you may have heard a few popcorn farts re: our sites being threatened by hackers," wrote KISS bassist Gene Simmons on his website yesterday, responding to a DDoS attack that took down GeneSimmons.com earlier this week.

The attack was part of Operation Payback, a campaign that over the past few weeks has been targeting organizations who legislate and litigate in support of copyright laws. Loosely organized by Anonymous, a group of Internet "vigilantes" has launched a series of denial-of-service attacks against the likes of the MPAA, the RIAA, the UK Intellectual Property Office, as well as against the KISS bassman.

In order to help offset the costs of delivering an increasing amount of video, Wikipedia is experimenting with BitTorrent P2P technology.

As Michael Dale notes in the foundation's announcement, "One potential problem with increased video usage on the Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images that make up Wikipedia articles today. Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships."

In November, we told you about a move in the UK to monitor P2P sharing and permanently ban users who infringed on copyright from using the Internet.

In our reporting on P2P issues, it's rare these days to get wind of some good news; today, we've learned that this plan to ban would not, in fact, apply to most file-sharing fiends. After one ISP stood up to the government's proposals by circulating a petition, the government responded favorably, saying, "We are not requiring ISPs to monitor for unlawful file-sharing. Nor are we proposing that ISPs look at what users download in order to combat piracy... We will not terminate the accounts of infringers."