Do you remember… the LimeWire download that wasn't what it said?

The download crept along all evening, and at last the song you’d been waiting for was yours. Except it wasn’t. It was a different band, a live version recorded from the back of a field, or a file that made your antivirus light up like a Christmas tree.

LimeWire launched in 2000, and for years it was how a huge number of people got their music. It passed files directly between users’ computers, so there was nobody to check that a file was what its name said. Titles lied. File sizes lied. The family computer slowly filled up with mysteries, and occasionally with something worse.

Everyone has a story: the album track that turned out to be a remix, the film that turned out to be something else entirely, the pop-up that simply wouldn’t go away.

In October 2010 a US federal judge ordered LimeWire to switch off its file sharing for good, after years of legal action by the record labels. Somewhere, though, an old hard drive is still full of files called “track 01 (real).mp3”.