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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...
But Dr. Evil, that kind of money doesn't exist in 2003!!!
U.S. gdp is 10.2 trillion...
Right, like the RIAA really lost $97.8 trillion worth of potential income from STUDENTS.
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
Assuming a person lives for exactly 76 years.... With that sum of money a person would have to spend $40.78 every second for his/her entire life, every day, and including during the night. That isn't taking into account the massive interest it would generate. Isn't that amount of money larger that the GNP of the US for a several year period. Honestly though, how do they expect to prove that each and every song did $150,000 worth of damage. If each album has 12 tracks and retails for $15, they'd have to prove that each album he offered caused 120,000 less copies of that album to be sold. Please!
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
$150,000 * 652,000
... ohh, about a factor of a thousand?
= $97,800,000,000
= $97,800,000 thousand
= $97,800 million
= $97.8 billion
I think they're off by,
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?
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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,
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
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.
Sure...97.8 Trillion might sound like quite a bit upfront...
:-)
However, after all of the lawyers take their cut, the appropriate RIAA officials remove their share and court costs are assessed, I calculate the net gain for the actual artists to be somewhere in the neighborhood of about $20 bucks and smack on the ass!
- n2q
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
Ok, so I believe that the article is off in their calculations and it should be billion with a "B". At any rate, it seems that given the silly amount of money they are going after, the "accused" would simply laugh that sort of claim off. Yes, stealing is stealing. However, this sort of suit does nothing to help the RIAA's case. They would be far more effective by bringing more realistic suits in terms of dollar amounts that would actually perhaps frighten folks and keep them from posting media to the net for download.
This whole music suit thing brings up another interesting exchange I had last week. One of the campus network guys was asking if I had any music on my workstation. I said yes, about thirty gigs or so, to which he replied, I had to take it off as the RIAA was "querying" systems on the network to determine if they contained music files. I replied as every song on there was purchased, paid for, and personally ripped from CD via iTunes, and I had every CD for which there was music for, I was not going to remove the music. Additionally, while my workstation was on the network, it was not open, the songs were not available to the outside world and anyone wanting those songs would have to hack into my system. So, no. I would not remove them. Even if the RIAA does somehow "query" my system, (Is this somehow possible if the system is "secure"?) they would be barking up the wrong tree.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
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?
Will you accept a check?
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.
Assume an average 3-minute 128kbps MP3 - about 3 MB. 3 MB * 652000 = 1956000 MB. About 2 TERABYTES.
Did this guy have a 20-disk RAID in his box, or am I missing something?
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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
People are focusing on the wrong thing. The point isn't $97T, $97B or $100K. The point is that the RIAA is finally going after a law breaker. They went after colleges and other carriers for too long even though *they weren't breaking the law*.
Now they are going after the kids that actually broke the law and everyone is still pissed.
Hell with that. These kids should be the ones being put to trial. Maybe now the laws can be shown for the unmitigated sillyness that they are and either shown unconstitutional or at least have a $97B judgement against some kids show the public how out of control this all is.
This is the right suit. Let's make sure it's the right result by now dwelling on the RIAA and instead dwelling on the law.
I've got some downloading to do. I only owe them $687.3 million.
Here is an idea:
Why don't you all just sod off and NOT BUY ANY MORE CD'S!!!!!!!
Then, the RIAA constituent companies will lose money and be forced to deal with the issue.
Listen to the radio, got to concerts, gad, get out from in front of the computer(yes I see the irony), put down the porn and go out and do something. Read a book. A real book. Not some Piers Anthony sexual romp.
Go to the library, sit, where it is free, and read book, for free. Grahm Greene's "The Power and the Glory" is good. Maybe "Heart of Darknes" by Conrad. Edmund Morris's "Theodore Rex" and "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" are good choices.
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.
File trading is so easy and so desirable on the small scale, that it's impossible to deter it using the courts. You can't haul in everyone who trades files -- so you have to increase the deterrence by really walloping the few that you can. The problem is that there's little difference (to a student) between having to pay 97,000 dollars, or 97,000,000 dollars. Upping the ante by another factor of a million, to 97,000,000,000,000 dollars, isn't any more of a deterrent -- at that point it devolves to abstract numbers.
Another millieu that shows the same kind of saturation deterrence is the drug war (spit). It's easy, cheap, and desirable enough for many folks to smoke pot, that the courts literally could not handle them all. Stiffer penalties don't work so well, because the penalties are already so unreasonably stiff that they don't affect most peoples' risk assessment.
When this phenomenon occurs in photography, it's called "reciprocity failure" normally, each additional photon hitting a piece of film exposes the film the same amount, regardless of the actual intensity -- so you can photograph a dim object, with a longer exposure time. But for very long exposure times, that picture breaks down: the partially-exposed silver halide grains repair themselves in between photon strikes, so exposing film to a weak light source for a very long time doesn't have the effect you'd expect. It makes sense to think of file trading and the drug war as examples of deterrence reciprocity failure.
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
You live in a country with an incredibly good road system. You can get *anywhere* in the continental US by road. You can't get more than 15 miles away from a road in the continetal US.
And Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Sweden all have poor transportation?
You have running water. Reliably. You have indoor plumbing. You have readily available food. You have electricity.
Again, CA, FR, GB, IT, DE, SE don't have these?
You live in a place that has as many cars as families, because cars and gas are just that damned cheap here.
Is this a good thing? Do you know how much O2 a 5-liter Uh-mer-kin muscle car chews up just from driving to and from work on a semi-daily basis? Do you have any idea how many CO2-consuming organisms it takes to support your average Camero or Mustang owner? Why do we have so many cars here? Why aren't they needed in Manhattan or in most of Europe? Because our automotive industry killed our light rail industry in the first half of this century. We produce 3% of the world's oil. We consume nearly 60%. Hence our current predicament with our dependency on foreign oil. No, having that many cars is not something to boast about.
You don't have to fear for your life walking down the street (well, in some places, you do, but it's safer here than much of the rest of the world).
In most Iranian metropolitan areas, women can walk around at 03:00 alone without fear of abduction or harassment. People there don't give it any thought. I can't name one major city where this is true in the United States.
This is a nation in which *anyone* can get a job. Not necessarily a good job, or the job they want, but you can land a job that'll pay well enough for you to eat every day.
Unemployment in Switzerland has not reached more than 6% in over ten years. It averages around 3%-4%. You should read this if you want a better handle on what it means to be employed in this country.
I can drink the water anywhere in this nation without fear. Some places it looks a little brown, or have hard water, etc., but you can drink it without *dying*.
Once more, CA, FR, GB, IT, DE, SE don't have these?
You have incredible medical care. I know many places have better systems for covering payment, and it's free in many places, but there's very few places in US where you can't get immediate medical care.
The US has the best doctors in the world. We also have the highest liability. Does this seem odd to you? We are encouraging our doctors to become mediocre because it's not worth it to practice. I've talked with a fair amount of doctors (my family has more than its fair share of people working in medicine). They almost unilaterally have two pieces of advice for people in this country:
1. If you're thinking of becoming a doctor: don't.
2. Don't get sick, because unless you're rich, you'll get shit for care.
It's simply that, the particular set of advantages you get by being an American and living here on American soil is almost impossible to get anywhere else. Many places have worthwhile tradeoffs, but you can't get all the above just about anywhere else.
I realize that many of the above comments don't apply to everywhere in the world, and I apologize to the denizens of any nation that may be that much better, but I think that most of them apply somewhere.
The truth is that many cities outside the US are more livable than those within its borders. Hell, there are 9 countries which rank higher than we do in an audit of world democracies.
Please don't misunderstand. The US is a great place to live...one of the best in the world. I'm just real tired of its citizens thinking that this country's shit
moto411.com
1) Why hasn't an organization arisen to challenge the RIAA? I mean, it's my understanding that being a member of the RIAA is *not* legally required of a record label. When one considers the tons of indie labels out there that, thanks to free downloading off websites and through p2p networks, it makes me wonder why large groups of independents that have good talent and catalogs, like Caroline, Epitaph, Six Degrees, all the way down to little labels like ESL, tru thoughts, fork in hand and others haven't forged an alliance simply to combat this insanity. This seems like a golden opportunity to seize the thunder of the big six and woo bands to the "free music" side of the aisle. But then, when one considers how often bands tend to jump around labels, maybe the problem is more endemic to record labels than just the big six...
2) Speaking of bands, where are "the talent" in all this? why don't we hear from the bands beyond the occasional (apparent) nutcase voicing his opinion then going back to the label lounge? We keep hearing about how the big nasty RIAA is pimping their work and buying out their right to their creative work (if I have to hear Tom Petty's sob story one more time I'm going to puke), but why aren't so many top label bands coming out in favor for/against the RIAA behavior? Many of the A-list acts can certainly get along just fine no matter what label they're on, so if they can extricate themselves from the labels, why don't they? If Fred Durst really thinks mp3's should be free, why doesn't he just jump ship and release his band's own stuff on his own terms? Oh wait, he's VP of Interscope. Nevermind....
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown