Attendees arrived to their “luxury accommodation” of domed tents on the notorious Fyre Festival.
Source: Seth Crossno
LimeWire, the filesharing service that set the web ablaze within the 2000s earlier than being shut down for copyright infringement, mentioned Tuesday that’s buying the rights to Fyre Festival.
And it appreciates the irony.
“LimeWire Acquires Fyre Festival Brand — What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” the corporate titled its news release.
LimeWire mentioned it could “unveil a reimagined vision for Fyre — one that expands beyond the digital realm and taps into real-world experiences, community, and surprise.” The firm supplied no extra particulars about how the Fyre model shall be relaunched.
For years, LimeWire operated as a competitor to fellow file-sharing platform Napster earlier than being successfully shut down by a court docket ruling in 2010 after a choose dominated 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 pageant that noticed ticket consumers spend hundreds of {dollars} for a weekend within the Bahamas solely to be met with a logistics debacle that included transportable bogs taking the place of standard bogs, and low-budget meals choices that betrayed guarantees of celeb chef fare. Organizer Billy McFarland was later convicted of fraud and sentenced to 6 years in jail.
“Fyre became a symbol of hype gone wrong, but it also made history,” LimeWire CEO Julian Zehetmayr mentioned. “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 mentioned its bid was backed by Maximum Effort, the inventive company co-founded by the actor and entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds.
“Congrats to LimeWire for their winning bid for Fyre Fest,” Reynolds mentioned within the launch. “I look forward to attending their first event but will be bringing my own palette of water.”