Last week, hacker "MetaPirate" and his "horde of piratical monkeys" released LimeWire: Pirate Edition to the world. The program took all the file-sharing features of the popular LimeWire Pro and made them free of charge and free of central controls. "Speaking for myself, the motivation is to make RIAA lawyers cry into their breakfast cereal," MetaPirate told Ars.

RIAA lawyers have apparently downed their cereal and are now on the hunt for MetaPirate's identity, and a federal court is backing their search. LimeWire has launched its own investigation into MetaPirate, too, and they've already managed to take his website offline.

"Good luck, I'm behind seven proxies," MetaPirate told us a few days ago. He'd better hope so.

"An agent provocateur for the RIAA"



When a federal judge recently shut down LimeWire, she ordered the site to cease all distribution of its software and to shut down all software in the wild. The release of LimeWire: Pirate Edition just a few days later was a result of LimeWire's earlier decision to open-source its code, but the release did show real facility with the codebase. Speculation has mounted that MetaPirate was in fact a LimeWire employee.

"An anonymous developer calling himself or herself 'Meta Pirate' launched the website at http://metapirate.webs.com that provides users with several links to download the LimeWire Pirate Edition," wrote record label attorneys this week. "Press reports indicated that 'Meta Pirate' is either formerly or presently a Lime Wire employee. Plaintiffs requested expedited discovery to uncover the identity of 'Meta Pirate.'"

They got their wish, as the court authorized discovery of MetaPirate's identity. The court has also ordered LimeWire to turn over a host of documentation, including:

(i) a list of all current and former employees of the Defendant who, to Defendants' knowledge, have had possession or knowledge of the private key used to sign the LimeWire SIMPP file in the past year, and (ii) a list of all known LimeWire software developers, programmers, or other employees who, to Defendants' knowledge, would have been capable of excising the features that were removed from LimeWire 5.6 beta before it was redistributed as the LimeWire Pirate Edition.

But LimeWire (the company) has already been investigating MetaPirate, because it needs to appear proactive here. Indeed, the RIAA has already used the MetaPirate incident to claim yesterday that LimeWire should be taken over by a court-appointed receiver. So LimeWire LLC has scrambled, and it managed to obtain a court order to shut down MetaPirate's existing website.

MetaPirate tells Ars today that he can't do anything about this particular shutdown. "We cannot contest the court order while remaining anonymous," he says, "but our software remains available from The Pirate Bay and other sites.

When I asked MetaPirate directly whether he had ever worked for LimeWire, the response was terse: "I am an agent provocateur for the RIAA, and you can quote me on that. Seriously though, which press reports are they talking about? The court appears to require a lower standard of proof than Wikipedia."

MetaPirate insists that LimeWire: Pirate Edition merely used the existing open source LimeWire codebase and that "the monkeys who created LimeWire Pirate Edition are not associated in any way with Lime Wire LLC."

Whatever the case, the hunt is on. RIAA lawyers are working independently to uncover MetaPirate's tracks, while LimeWire LLC must reveal the results of its own investigation to the court by the end of today.