Limewire has officially announced that it is planning to convert its P2P download application into a music download service offering DRM free mp3 music similar to Napster. The downloads are going to be at the bit rate of 256 Kbps.

Recently Limewire was taken to court by RIAA for sharing illegal data through its service and it now faces a penalty of upto $150,000 for every illegal song download . It is probably because of this reason that they are going to open a legal music download store which will work from an independent site and will be available through Limewire store. Two companies IRIS distribution & Network Productions have already announced that they will support this service.

Limewire is a famous P2P software which allows it users to share digital data such as mp3 , videos , movies etc and most of them are pirated. With RIAA tightning its stance against such P2P services , we can wait to see whether Kazaa etc will follow the same example.