LimeWire, the defunct file sharing service, and its owner are agreeing to pay the record labels $105 million to end a 5-year-old copyright-infringement lawsuit.

The settlement, first reported by CNET, came Thursday during the second week of a trial in which a New York jury was sitting to determine how much the Recording Industry Association of America should get paid. LimeWire faced more than $1 billion in damages. The Copyright Act allows damages of up to $150,000 per infringement.

The deal clearly marks the end of a legal era.

The case against the nation’s last for-profit file sharing service commenced as the RIAA began its lawsuit campaign against individual fire sharers. Some 20,000-plus suits against individuals were brought in all — a legal campaign that has now been virtually abandoned.

With the old-school litigation strategy behind it, the labels now face their next big task as the digital age has mutated to the cloud age: how to deal with Amazon and Google, which have begun offering storage-locker services allowing music fans to play their tunes from the cloud on devices of their choice.

Neither Amazon nor Google has obtained the labels’ permission for their services. Apple is expected to unveil a music-cloud offering soon, and it’s not been revealed whether it has the labels’ blessing.

If music can be played and stored on an iPhone, for example, then the same music can be played legally over the internet on the same phone. Or so the theory goes.

But the 10,000-pound gorilla in the room is the unclear legality of these storage services playing host to pirated music. And that’s where the labels might have some legal muscle.

After all, the judge in the LimeWire case, who ordered the service shut down, had ruled last year that LimeWire’s users commit a “substantial amount of copyright infringement,” and that the Lime Group — the company behind the application — “has not taken meaningful steps to mitigate infringement.”

RIAA chief executive Mitch Bainwol said in a statement about the LimeWire case that “designing and operating services to profit from the theft of the world’s greatest music comes with a stiff price.”

With the LimeWire precedent in its pocket, the labels might have some leverage when negotiating payment deals with Amazon, Apple and Google.

Before the RIAA filed suit in 2006 against LimeWire, the record labels’ trade group urged it to license its material or shut down. LimeWire refused.

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