One monster Hollywood really hoped would stay dead after its drawn out torture and subsequent recent slaying was the hugely popular LimeWire file-sharing client. However, rather like the abuse suffered by the Black Knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, the sustained attack by the RIAA turned out to be a mere flesh wound.

"On October 26 the remaining LimeWire developers were forced to shut down the company's servers and modify remote settings in the filesharing client to try to harm the Gnutella network. They were then laid off," a source told TorrentFreak.

"Shortly after, a horde of piratical monkeys climbed aboard the abandoned ship, mended its sails, polished its cannons, and released it free to the community."

And so, LimeWire Pirate Edition (LPE) was born. Based on the LimeWire 5.6 beta that was briefly released earlier this year and then withdrawn when Lime Wire LLC lost its lawsuit, LPE is now in the wild. In many ways, it is better than the version killed by the RIAA.

"All dependencies on LimeWire LLC's servers have been removed, all remote settings have been disabled, the Ask toolbar has been unbundled, and all features of LimeWire PRO have been activated for free," our source explained.

"LimeWire Pirate Edition should work better than the last functioning version of LimeWire (5.5.10), and it should keep working for longer. There's no adware or spyware: the piratical monkeys are doing this for the benefit of the community."

Currently only available for Windows, in our tests LimeWire Pirate Edition functioned perfectly well and is already circulating on BitTorrent.