Plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit accusing CNET of facilitating "massive copyright infringement" by distributing peer-to-peer software dropped their case Monday.

The May lawsuit was lodged in Los Angeles by a handful of musicians and filmmaker Alkiviades David. They accused CBS Interactive — CNET's publisher — of illicitly profiting from piracy by distributing 220 million copies of LimeWire over CNET's Download.com site since 2008 — accounting for 95 percent off all LimeWire downloads.

The case appeared to be nearing its demise last month when the plaintiffs submitted just six copyrights as being infringed. On the July 4 holiday, David quietly dropped the suit.

What remains to be seen are threats by David's attorney, Adam Wolfson, who wrote in a filing that the case would be re-filed to represent more plaintiffs and "many thousands of songs and other copyrighted works." (.pdf)

The now-defunct LimeWire service agreed in May to pay $105 million to settle accusations from the recording industry that LimeWire users committed a "substantial amount of copyright infringement." In that lawsuit, the Recording Industry Association of America sought damages on 9,715 copyrighted recordings, and forced LimeWire of New York to shutter.

CBS has maintained it would "prevail" in the David case.

The Copyright Act allows for damages of up to $150,000 per infringement.

David claimed that CNET maintained a "business model to profit directly from the demand for infringing P2P clients."

See Also: