LimeWire, the filesharing service that set the internet ablaze in the 2000s before being shut down for copyright infringement, said Tuesday that is acquiring the rights to Fyre Festival.
And it appreciates the irony.
"LimeWire Acquires Fyre Festival Brand — What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" the company titled its news release.
LimeWire said it would “unveil a reimagined vision for Fyre — one that expands beyond the digital realm and taps into real-world experiences, community, and surprise.” The company offered no additional details about how the Fyre brand will be relaunched.
For years, LimeWire operated as a competitor to fellow file-sharing platform Napster before being effectively shut down by a court ruling in 2010 after a judge ruled it had facilitated large-scale copyright violations. In 2022, Austrian brothers Julian and Paul Zehetmayr bought LimeWire’s intellectual property and turned it into an NFT service.
Fyre Festival was a 2017 music festival that saw ticket buyers spend thousands of dollars for a weekend in the Bahamas only to be met with a logistics debacle that included portable bathrooms taking the place of regular toilets, and low-budget food options that betrayed promises of celebrity chef fare. Organizer Billy McFarland was later convicted of fraud and sentenced to six years in prison.
“Fyre became a symbol of hype gone wrong, but it also made history,” LimeWire CEO Julian Zehetmayr said. “We’re not bringing the festival back — we’re bringing the brand and the meme back to life. This time with real experiences, and without the cheese sandwiches.”
LimeWire said its bid was backed by Maximum Effort, the creative agency co-founded by the actor and entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds.
“Congrats to LimeWire for their winning bid for Fyre Fest,” Reynolds said in the release. “I look forward to attending their first event but will be bringing my own palette of water.”
