Warner Music’s Edgar Bronfman Jr. told a federal jury weighing damages caused by Lime Wire’s copyright infringement that the effect on Warner’s business was “devastating.”

Bronfman, 54, testified that the drop in revenue caused by peer-to-peer music-sharing services such as Lime Wire forced Warner to fire employees and release fewer recordings.

Warner’s chief executive said he had hoped the services would shut down voluntarily after the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that Grokster, another music-sharing program, could be held liable for infringement

“When Lime Wire kept operating it frustrated me greatly,” Bronfman told jurors yesterday in a Manhattan courtroom. “It was devastating, frankly.”

Music labels owned by Warner Music, Sony, Vivendi and Citigroup are seeking hundreds of millions of dollars from Lime Wire and its founder, Mark Gorton, after federal judge Kimba Wood ruled last May that Lime Wire induced the infringement of copyrights on thousands of songs through its peer-to-peer file-sharing software on the Internet.

The record labels will try to get statutory damages under federal copyright law for 9,561 recordings released since 1972, according to court papers. Maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each recording would result in a $1.4 billion award.