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RIAA Seeks Estimated $97.8 Billion From MTU Student
theodp writes "The Detroit Free Press does the math on the damages sought by the RIAA from the Michigan Technological University student. The total? About $97.8 trillion--yes, trillion with a T--or enough money to buy every CD sold in America last year over again for the next 120,000 years, according to RIAA statistics." Update: 04/05 21:58 GMT by M : The Free Press can do the math, but not very well: the numbers provided show the RIAA is seeking some $97 billion dollars, not trillion. I'm sure the student is *much* happier. Headline updated.
Well that explains the lawyers with frickin' lasers mounted on their frickin' heads...
i want 2 copies of each CD!!! :)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Oh, I just had to say it..
Throw me a frick'n bone, people.
But Dr. Evil, that kind of money doesn't exist in 2003!!!
That could buy a really large Beowulf Cluster.
"RIAA starts funding US military actions in countries with highest piracy rates"... you can buy many missiles with $97.8 trillion.
The problem in the world today is communication. Too much communication - Homer Simpson
... at least give em a break on the Hanson tracks, we all knew they were a fad
John Ashcroft says there is no such thing as excessive punishment! (unless if it's drunk driving and snorting coke and you're in Texas and... oh, never mind)
Dude, I'm thinkin' that if I were staring down the barrel of $97.8 TRILLION dollar lawsuit, I'd be tempted to find a country without extradition treaties. Preferably a friendly, inexpensive country with a tropical climate and lots of nude beaches.
What's the statute of limitations for copyright violations?
Brought to you by:
The United States of America(R) (A Wholely Owned Subsidiary of A Consortium of Multinational Corporations)
How else are they going to buy more laws? I mean, come on, buying laws isn't cheap.
That kind of money could buy a lot of laws.
Brilliant!!!
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
It makes me sad to think about someone facing that kind of lawsuit. So, to feel better, I'm firing up my Kazaa client and downloading some happy songs. I suggest you all do the same, just not on any school campus.
Sit back and relax as Windows 98 installs on your computer.
I think they're off by, ... ohh, about a factor of a thousand?
I'm sure the students are breathing a sigh of relief that it's only $97.8 billion...
Ya think?
Hmmm, should we seek some reasonable amount to compensate for our loss? Something like $4,000 or so? That ought to cover it.
Umm, no... we need to send a message. We need to make sure that it gets in the papers. Let's sue them for (wait for it...) a _million_ dollars!
What?! Are you nuts? You'll never collect, these kids don't have that kind of money and no judge in the universe is going to award that kind of judgement! You might as well sue them for a hundred-trillion dollars.
Oh, I see... Then we'll do that! That way they'll know we are _serious_!!!
*groan*
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Are people eager to jump in and replace them?
Student 1: Hey man, the mp3s are down... how the hell am I going to get my muzak.
Student 2: Didn't you hear, the RIAA shut them down!
Student 1: Crap. We should probably start something up to replace them, then.
Student 2: You didn't let me finish, they're getting sued for 97.8 trillion dollars!
Student 1: Hmm... on the other hand, maybe we should make a website about cats.
You didn't use the RIAA special loss due to priracy arithmetic. Its the same calculations used to calculate what music the american public is going to buy and how much.
Using this much more complex adding system, you will reach the result of 97.8 Trillion dollars
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
Oops...guess I should have double-checked their math before I posted--good catch! Even at $97.8B, that's still a whole lot of hours at a part-time Kinko's job. :-)
I'll get my coat...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Will you accept a check?
Probably the same way they calculated that a desktop PC contains 48 CD burners.
The damages they're claiming is more than double the GDP of the entire fucking planet. I'm seriously flabbergasted that they haven't been fined out of existance by the courts for continuously abusing the system.
according to some popular sites on the web, the human being is worth real rough about 2 million bucks, if you want to buy the parts, i mean. so at 2 million a person... (no really, at least one site told me 2 million- www.humanforsale.com).. er.. this is the part where i wish i finished high school math (i was worth about 850k so bear with me) 97 trillion = 97 000 000 000 000 divided by 2 000 000. so ugh. thats like 97 000 000 divided by 2, right? so 48.5 million people. So the RIAA should just collect those college students and their immediate and distant families and stop when they hit 48.5 million people. then they can just pack 'em up and drive them over and shut the hell up.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
The numbers were "fudged" because the student was in possession of 42X CD writers.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I wish there were less pedants around here.
Maybe its something like 652 tracks. You know how the RIAA are good with numbers....
No, the $97.8 Trillion figure must be right. Otherwise it would mean that the music industry plays with numbers, making things artificially high when it suits them and artificially low when it suits the need to cheat the artists. Since it's an entire industry doing this as a collaborative effort, it would even rise to the levels of felony crimes including racketeering if it were shown that they have a long history of bogus math behind their accounting.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
payments reduced to a comfortable amount.
And the payments may even qualify as tax deductable.
Fewer!
Maybe this might work out best in the long run. The way I see it, eventually they're going to get a life-ruining judgment against a student who isn't all that stable to begin with, and then maybe said student will snap under the pressure of owing a billion or so to the RIAA. Then, instead of being a good little debtor (slave) for the rest of their lives, they'll go get a Glock and shoot up a record company's headquarters, operating under the idea that they might as well take some of the bastards with them. If they get lucky and tag an exec or two before they're killed it might cause the record companies to back down a bit, seeing as siccing the lawyers on a poor student ultimately ended up with a bloodbath.
Or not, in which case the ultimate result might be even more dead record people.
Which brings us to the following formulas:
97,800,000,000 / 281,421,906 = $347520 per citizen
I think the parent was moderated as interesting for his interesting use of division.
Peter
Downsize DC Today!
Maybe he put his 2 TBytes of mp3's in his backpack sized iPod. I'll bet the jog dial on that sucker is tough to reach when you're wearing it.
Peter
Downsize DC Today!
1. Find student with mp3s.
2. Sue student for $97 Billion
3. PROFIT!!!
Holy shit, it works!
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The size of a dollar bill is 6.6294 cm wide, by 15.5956 cm long, and 0.010922 cm in thickness.
A stack of one dollar bills worth $97.8 trillion would be 10 billion meters high or slightly more than 25 stacks of bills that each would reach to the moon.
Laid end-to-end the bills would stretch 15.25 trillion meters. That's long enough to stretch from the sun to pluto almost three times over.
That many dollar bills would cover the entire 68 square miles of the District of Columbia in a pile of bills two feet deep.
Oh, wait. Now I get it.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
That's Trillion with a "B"
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
I've got some downloading to do. I only owe them $687.3 million.
... the RIAA has been heard screaming, "You are our BITCH!!"
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
where are we gonna go?
everything in moderation
They've had us by the large boxes?
Or did you mean cojones?
And $12? Where are you getting CDs so cheap?
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
...would I have every thought I would be so happy for my campus' overly protective firewall.
-CPM
---You're all I need, When the water runs deep, You're all I need, Now I cry my soul to sleep -- Collective Soul, Needs
...the RIAA has now calculated that total sum of money owned by all the pirates in the world now exceeds the total value of Earth. Because of this, Earth today filed for restructuring under Chapter 11, making RIAA the supreme dictator. All hail RIAA!
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Obviously, the RIAA is alienating the biggest consumers of music by making them bankrupt.
Oh, wait, it's been doing that for years.
"Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so."
-Douglas Adams
David Borowitz
What credibility?
Huh? How is UNIX more fascist than Windows?