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.

Comments

Eighth Amendment Problem?

[Sunlighter]

The Eighth Amendment says: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Are we talking about a claim of actual damages? If so, the RIAA is claiming that it and its members would have made up about 99% of the U.S. economy had this one person not pirated that music. Or are we talking about statuatory damages? In that case I think the eighth amendment would come into play -- that part about excessive fines in particular.

Re:Eighth Amendment Problem?

[chaidawg]

The bill of rights only outlines rights provided by citizens from the government. In a civil suit, where the government is not a party, the constitution has little say.

Re:a little much?

[dougmc]

U.S. gdp is 10.2 trillion...

Yes. Per quarter.

So the RIAA is suing for an *estimated* (the $98T figure is an estimate, don't forget that) 2x the US's annual GNP.

I wonder if they'll take a check :)

Re:"Stealing is stealing"

[fyonn]

I agree entirely, I remember last year I heard an ad on the radio from the BSA telling everyone that "copyright infringement is theft". now as we all know, this is completely and utterly not true and so I wrote to the Advertising Standards Authority. I told them of my concern and I even gacve them a court reference to a british court decision (I'm in the UK) where it was said explicitly that copyright infringement is not theft..

you know what? they didn't care. thegist of their reply was "you know what they mean, now shut up and sod off"

I was not very impressed.

dave

These are statutory damages

[DeepRedux]

Under US copyright law, the registered copyright owner can ask for up to $150K per work for willful statutory damages . If the infringment is not willful, they can only get up to $30K per work.

Statutory damages do not require that they show any actual loss or that the infringer made any money. They only need to show that they owned the copyright and that infringment occured.

Also, this would be a civil case so the money is for damages, not fines.

652,000 Songs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to pick on a different number for a while:

652,000 songs that the student was allegedly serving? Even at 15 tracks per CD, that's more than 43,000 CDs. Assuming they're just 3 minute long pop songs (no symphonic movement long tracks), it would take over 11 years to listen to them once, if you worked at it 8 hours a day.

I did a search on Amazon's "Popular Music" section for "CD" and got 4117 hits. 11023 hits on "All Products", which includes computer books with CDs, books about CDs, and whatnot.

Just how many music CDs are in print in the first place? No matter how dedicated a pirate, I doubt this guy has a collection of every track ever laid down on any medium by any musician.

And if the music industry really is churning out this many tracks: no wonder they're crap.

Incidentally, 652,000 * 150,000 = 97.8 billion, not trillion. But it's still a silly number.

Re:652,000 MP3s?!?

[goofy183]

In another article it is specified that HIS collection was only about 1100 songs. The 650,000 number comes from the number of songs in the FlatLan index he was running ... so he is getting sued for pretty much ALL the MP3s at MTU.