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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.
It really bugs me when the RIAA calls copyright violation, "Stealing." This is not stealing music. If I were to steal music, I would walk into my local Circuit City, grab some CDs, and run out the door. They lose their merchandise, I now have their CDs.
/. knows, is NOT stealing.
...I'm such a music lover that I'd be downloading probably 50 songs a month, probably more. That's $25 that the record industry would get out of my pocket that they would have never seen before.
Downloading or having mp3s, as I'm sure every person who reads
At the same time, while I understand the need for deterrent from downloading copyrighted mp3s, I still don't understand why the RIAA seems to be resisting the method of distributing music digitally. Are they planning on going back to cassette tapes? We've got this incredible method of getting into almost everyone's home to distribute music and reduce their costs, and all they want to do is sue people who are allegedly taking their business away.
Not that this is a justification of my downloading mp3s, but I wouldn't have bought probably 3/4 of the mp3s I have because I simply want one song off of the CD. If the record companies would just come up with a service that charged 25-50 cents a song,
From the Article: "Stealing is stealing," Oppenheim said. "Those are major, significant networks. This was a student who created a piracy bazaar."
Yes, stealing is stealing.
Stealing is especially stealing when your corporate interests have bought and paid for laws, which are now being used to essentially ruin the lives of (ie: steal the futures of)students who never would have even heard your product had it not been for file-sharing.
I don't agree with most arguments for file-sharing. It is common sense that the artists and lavels should make money for the songs, and there should quickly set up some usable system - a good one does not currently exist. When it does, I and many, many, many people like me will eagerly use it.
But $98 TRILLION??? [choke] That's just stupidly extortionate.
Lets do some other math here using the following factors:
Moneys sued for my RIAA: $97,800,000,000
Average life expentancy in the US: 76 years
Average cost of a CD: $15
Number of Months in a year: 12
US Population as of April 1st 2000: 281,421,906
Which brings us to the following formulas:
97,800,000,000 / 281,421,906 = $347520 per citizen
$347520 / $15 = 23168 CD's per person in the US.
23168 / 76 = 304 CD's per year/person in the US
304 / 12 months = 25 CD's/month for their entire life from birth that each person in the US must by to be equal to the damages they are filing for.
Now there is a possibility that there was a math error as some have suggested and it might be 97.8 billion dollars instead of trillion.
If so that just breaks down to 23 CD's in each person's lifetime for every person born. Which there is no way in the world that one person could of downloaded that much.
Given that they are roughly charging $1 per track(23 * population * average tracks on a CD) is roughly 97.8 billion.
Then take into account that an average MP3 is about 5 megs, that comes out to 5 * 97,800,000,000, or 489,000,000,000 Also known as roughly 489 Terrabytes of music.
Which brings me to the question who's network attached storage solution did they use to store all that alledged music?
The fact that an MTU student was chosen leads me to believe that the RIAA isn't going to stop with the students. Perhaps they are hoping to receive a billion dollar judgement that the student will be unable to pay so that they may go after the university itself, citing that they allowed this sort of thing to go down on their networks, leaving the RIAA with a large amount of 'unrecoverable damages' Now, IANAL- but as a former MTU student, I have seen how much the school has "cooperated" with the RIAA. As early as 1998, I was removed from the dorm LAN due to my operation of an FTP server with an easily remembered password, which generated alot of traffic. By going after students early, MTU has opened themselves up to lawsuits due to making a pseudo-admission that they feel it is their responsibility to monitor the networks. Serves the 'U' right, in my opinion, for attempting to help the RIAA.
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
Can't we just buy the RIAA, and be done with? According to this chart:
http://www.riaa.com/pdf/2002yrendshipments.pdf
if I'm reading it right... the various media companies had 12.6 Billion in revenue in 2002. That's revenue, not profit. The $97B still looks pretty silly, eh? Anyone know what the profit amount is? Surely it's much less.
Anyway, for 250M Americans, that's about $48/year/person. How about we just include that amount in our taxes, and we all get all the free music we want? Let the record stores, P2P services, etc... all compete to sell $.50 CDs, all the downloads you can eat, etc..
I'm sure the dollar amount will be much less if we just consider the profit amount, too. Then radio stations dont have to pay licensing fees, and the RIAA can let go all the staff who have to track piracy, thereby increasing their per-employee performance.
We'll still let them exist so they can tell us who the top 40 are, who has gold "records", which record companies and artists get how much of the share, etc.. you know, all that stuff they are supposed to exist for.
Heck, I've got more money and kids than most people.. I'd be happy to pay a proportionally higher amount to help subsidize poor people. Put it on my phone bill, $4/month, like we do to subsidize people in the middle of nowhere and old people.
Copyright laws were never meant to be abused in this way. Its a shame that our society has let this situation progress to the horrible condition that it is presently in. Reading this article reminds me of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, I really feel like never paying for a CD again. The thing that really boils my blood is that its a giant corporation that is sueing these poor college students, not the artists - the ones who should really own the music that they produce. The artists get ripped on their own works of art, and the consumer gets ripped off paying for it. The only people that win are the recording labels. I'll "steal" all the stinking music I want. Copyright laws were intended to protect someone from claiming that they produced an original work or idea, not to give mega-corporations the right to rip everyone off. Thomas Jefferson wrote about copyright laws and he said that the right of owning property is something that a society grants its citizens and it is not a natural right. The society can change how it looks upon property (copyright laws) at any minute. I think its time that we change the way our copyright laws work. If Congress won't listen to its citizens and only to corporations that pad their pockets, they it is time that we rebel! We have a right to rebel and change our government when they listen to corporations over citizens. This is something that our founding fathers, and many intellectuals throught history would support. Why are we letting ourselves get walked all over, when our country is supposed to be one of "freedom", "democracy", and "rule by the people"? We need to change this now before it is too late!
SIGFAULT