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RIAA Says LimeWire Owes $1.5 Trillion
An anonymous reader writes "LimeWire owes the major record labels one point five trillion dollars, at a conservative estimate. At least, that's what an RIAA lawyer says. He also wants LimeWire shut down and its assets frozen, says Ray Beckerman's Recording Industry vs The People blog."
And I used to say MY lawyer was expensive.....
Good! Now the U.S. Gov't. needs to seize RIAA. That'll take a sizable chunk out of our $13+ trillion deficit!
sigfault (core dumped)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Wow.... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA And they expect to get this money how? Are there any corporations around that even have a market cap above a trillion? They might as well ask for a BAJILLION!
Yeah and GPS systems owe police millions of dollars in fines for helping criminals know a quick route out of town.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I didn't realize that the RIAA would let them off so easily. Oh well, LimeWire can always appeal and get it kicked up to a couple vigintillion a la Jammie Thomas.
My work here is dung.
I am submitting a bill for 500 million to McDonalds, Phillip Morris and Jack Daniels for turning me into a Fat Alcoholic who smokes.
The appropriate response to such a statement is a delivery of mint Monopoly® bills to the sum of 1.5 trillion.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
If this isn't as clear an example of how the RIAA is making shit up as they go along, I don't know what it will take. They keep coming up with outrageous numbers and nobody blinks. So they come up with bigger numbers, and get away with it. And bigger numbers, and they get paid. And bigger numbers, and laws change. And now they are saying one company owes them $1.5 TRILLION. This has got to be the point where sane people around the world finally say "What? That's a joke, right? Please say that's a joke."
People are going to say that, right?
For a sense of scale, that rather silly number is about a thousand times the annual revenue of EMI. Also, this page feels kinda relevant.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
It should be clear to anyone that the damage caused by Limewire dwarf those from, say, BP.
Also, the RIAA is full of retards. No offense to people with actual disabilities, mind you, unless they work at the RIAA.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
At least, that's what a bald headed RIAA lawyer, his pinky to his mouth, and demanding sharks with laser beams says. His name is Dr. Evil, JD.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
will you take a check?
Unless Mr. Burns owns Limewire, I doubt they'll ever see even a tiny fraction of that $1,500,000,000,000.
Wow, by this google search, that amounts to just over 10% of the entire US GDP. Glad somebody's been genuinely productive this year.
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
By that standard of reasoning I shall now submit a claim to the RIAA for $1.75 quadrillion for inflicting me with what I can only describe as unwanted noisey rhythm.
Did the lawyer hold his pinky finger to the corner of his mouth and go MWAHAHAHAHA!!!!! as well?
You know, the justice system is at least supposed to give the illusion of justice in order to work. Apparently I can destroy the ecosystem of a good 20% of the American coastline and pay 20,000 times less than a company that made P2P file sharing easier.
What. The. Fuck.
goodluckwiththat ?
The music and movie industries earn somewhere around $35B/year in revenue, last I heard. Let's up that, with inflation, to $50B/year. How do they expect anyone to believe that Limewire alone has denied them 30 years worth of revenues in a span of about a decade?
Claims like this only serve to make normal people think they're pathological liars that deserve to be robbed blind.
$1.5 trillion is more than the combined revenue of every RIAA member in this history of the world.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
The sad thing is... the US courts may agree because they are buying into the whole 1 copy = 1 lost sale, at market value and the insane numbers this pseudo evaluation gives. If this spreads outside US with treaties I will indeed lose hope in humanity.
And borrowed Mike Myers to read the statement.
Seriously, does anybody inside the RIAA even believe this is about compensation anymore? It's courtroom theater paid for by the Taxpayer.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
This ridiculousness needed to be stopped at its source. Artists should have stopped signing on with the RIAA at least a decade ago. They are not needed. Even as a hobby, these days, you can afford to self-produce with your own studio, if you are so inclined.
No artists == no product == no RIAA.
I'm glad the RIAA is being realistic with it's demands. /sarcasm
... and are you sure it's not billion?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/limewire-owes-billio/
My guess is they were upset not having the most absurd declaration of the month...
This kind of things always make me shudder, they estimate the money they might have made had they lived in medieval times or something. It is similar to "losing an election": you never had the election, you never won, you cannot lose it. You cannot lose money you never had.
"I see undead people" Warcraft III - Necromancer
Okay, if the lawyer of the RIAA says this to a judge with a straight face and the judge doesn't literally LAUGH this guy out of court, I am going to take a loaded gun to my head and pull the trigger because it just proves I am not really crazy, these people are.
That value seems out of range, considering that you could finance two wars, clean up the BP spill and probably have enough left over to coat New Orleans in gold leaf...
In most scientific pursuits, getting a value that far out of range would lead a person to conclude that some of their underlying assumptions are invalid and cause them to form a more realistic hypothesis.
Apparently, in the riaa's world it means that they will develop superpowers and start traveling past the speed of light.
freaking morons
Wherever You Go, There You Are
By my calculations of the Zimbabwean dollar that would be about $3 Billion. Still a bit steep though.
Using this scale of damage assessment, (developed by the seized marijuana assaying department) I'm guessing BP owes the world roughly eleventy brazillion dollars.
Limewire with all it's trojans, is definately a public service. Shouldn't the people who downloaded from limewire be treated as a whole?
For that kind of money, LimeWire can put out contracts on all RIAA's lawyers and officers, and still have lots of money left over for all their officers to afford a comfortable retirement in a country with no extradition treaty with the United States... This is strictly an observation. I am not advocating such action, and I am sure it is quite illegal. So don't try this kids...
Under US Copyright law, damage awards are not necessarily connected to actual damages. The court is given a range (the range depends on whether the infringement is "wilful"), and may assign any damages it considers just from that range -- the plaintiff doesn't have to prove their actual damages. These statutory damages are figured out per act of infringement and the top of the range can be $150,000. To get the $1.5T figure the RIAA is arguing that LimeWire has contributed to 10M cases of infringement, and should be forced to pay the maximum penalty of $150K per. According to US law they are free to make this claim, but the court doesn't have to accept it. There is an argument that too wide a disparity between the actual damages (no more than $0.20 per downloaded song) and the damage award (say, the $9000 per download that has been awarded in a particular file-sharing case) might violate the Due Process Clause of the (14th Amendment to) the Constitution, but there is no definite Supreme Court precedent on that.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
At least we know they can pay around half in portable games.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
That's more than every RIAA member put together has made since the organisation was founded.
So trying to argue that that's how much better off they'd be if only Limewire didn't exist is transparently dumb.
Why do they think this line of argument is going to help their case?
The RIAA's logic is based on the absurd idea that a download equates to a loss.
As if each person who downloaded a song would have made a purchase, had P2P not been available.
Absurd.
And also based on the assumption that each copy of a song actually has tangible value, like a physical product.
Absurd again.
The best we can do to fight this is to put the RIAA sponsor companies out of business. Only buy independent music.
...what the fuck are they smoking.
The current US Gross Domestic Product is in the vicinity of 14 trillion dollars.
The RIAA honestly believes that Limewire owes them 10% of all the wealth produced by the United States in a year.
The RIAA was always living in their own little fantasy world, but I didn't realize the depth of their delusion until now.
This has to stop.
Or they 'graciously' settle for 1% and still laugh all the way to the bank.
Think about it. The RIAA's usual claim is that every downloaded file is a lost sale. and damages should be calculated based on that. Now by asking for this ludicrious figure, they've just put the lie to that previous assertion, since there is absolutely no way in hell that the general public could, or would have paid for $1 trillion worth of their products.
On the other hand, they've just claimed that Limewire has increased the net digital wealth of the world by something of the order of well over $1 trillion, something the RIAA could never have done by themselves. Way to go, Limewire!
"This has got to be the point where sane people around the world finally say "What? That's a joke, right? Please say that's a joke."
Trust me buddy, lots of us round the world have been having a good laugh at what the crazy Americans do for years. We'll just add it to the long list of why we think your nation is mad.
Nothing personal, we know most of you are lovely fine folk. But you've sure got your share of idiots that we're happy are an ocean away from us.
It just gets scary when our leaders import daft ideas they hear from your idiots, so please keep them quiet. Our politicians keep on copying them and try to better them. Please don't give our politicians any more ideas.
That's nothing, LimeWire's Dad owes my Dad 80 trillion million dollars!
What should be considered is, if filesharing were not around, at ALL, would their losses equal $1.5 trillion. Do their lawyers understand what a trillion is? I wonder if, in the entire history of the music industry, if they have taken in that much.
Cute trick - claim $1.5 Trillion with no hope of collecting and then you can go around saying that 'illegal sharing' is costing/has cost the industry "over $1.5 Trillion"
AT&ROFLMAO
That's not too bad. It's only like 40% of the US Federal Budget for 2009.
That'll only buy them:
100 F-35 (9 billion)
100 F-22 (15 billion)
3 Gerald R Ford class carriers (27 billion, carries 225 planes)
4 Virginia class submarines (11.2 billion)
10 Zumwalt class destroyers (33 billion)
And then they'll "only" have 1,400 billion dollars left. That should keep them in crew for a while as well.
That value seems out of range, considering that you could finance two wars, clean up the BP spill and probably have enough left over to coat New Orleans in gold leaf...
Exactly. So just think of all the hookers and blow that it can buy for record executives.
I'LL pay your 1.5 trillion...
But first, you need to wire me some transfer money so I can send you the 1.5 trillion.
Wire me 2 million and it should be OK.
Then I will send you your winnings, I mean money.
Thanks
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
It's not just the enormity of the demanded money, but how shamelessly they try to get EVERYTHING done in one go, flying under the radar. They want to have injection against Limewire, and EVERY "comparable system", which is defined as:
(i) any system or software that is substantially comparable to the LimeWire System and Software, including but not limited to FrostWire, Acquisition, BearFlix, Cabos, Gnucleus/GnucDNA, Gtk-gnutella, KCeasy, MP3 Rocket, Phex, Poisoned, Shareaza, Symella, BitTorrent, uTorrent, Vuze/Azureus, BitComet, Transmission, Deluge, BitLord, KTorrent, eDonkey, eMule, aMule, MLDonkey, xMule, Ares Galaxy, MP2P, Manolito, isoHunt, or Piratebay, as those systems or software existed before or as of the date of this Permanent Injunction;
I mean, come on! I'm lost for words...
Sue CERN for inventing the web.
Dear RIAA,
Fine then. But you owe me $170,000 in pain and suffering for that Britney Spears CD I bought.
Sincerely, everyone who ever bought a Britney Spears CD
Total bill, at $170,000 per legitimate purchase, comes to $ 1.73 trillion.
What do you say we call it even?
the $750 per infringement is per work, not per file. Are they really claiming that they have identified 200 million separate works?
Green-skinned space hookers with diamonds for eyes and souls as black as the record company executives' hearts...
Wherever You Go, There You Are
RIAA is an acronym designed to allow these companies to harm people anonymously. Can't we come up with a better acronym from the 'big 4': EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner? How about: WSUE - all lawsuit radio
Perhaps we'll get lucky and it will turn out they feed on record executives...
I wonder if they shoot for the huge numbers in case the court decides to award lesser damages.
For example, if they were shooting for $1m, and the court said "ok, well your arguments weren't perfect so we'll only award you 30% of that" (300k)... but if they're going for a trillion then suddenly a "lesser amount" of a few million may - to some - seem more sane by virtue of simply sounding less insane...
No private entity in the world has that much in holdings. Only governments are in possession of such amounts(I am talking liquid holdings). Let us not forget that there are major labels that have been found to be ripping off Canadian artist for billions, and probably up to trillions(as we probably are not aware of how far their "criminal" activities go), in stolen music for CDs made for sale in the United States(http://boingboing.net/2009/12/07/major-record-labels.html).
If I were looking at a case against me, especially at this level, I would bring this up in court. It is time that organizations, like the RIAA, be put out of business for tactics like this.
And a big thank you to RIAA to finally highlighting just how fucked up the copyright regime is. I knew you could do it, if given enough time.
It's more like "To compensate for the pony, Limewire must hand over the Space Shuttle."
I imagine some evil git sitting in a secret base with his pinky to he mouth laughing out "$1.5 trillion dollars".
Okay, this is a better effort: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTmXHvGZiSY
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Thats something like 500 billion to Uncle Sam.
It is no longer production that you are paying for. It's advertising. The big media companies MARKET STARS.
Sure, you could be the world's greatest singer and post your songs on your web site and maybe you'll get a small gathering of fans.
Or you can have a multi-billion-dollar advertising agency market you to the world, for a cut, and have millions of fans, even if you're not a great singer, as long as you have a pretty face.
You're paying for the marketing, not the distribution.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I wonder if, in the entire history of the music industry, if they have taken in that much.
They would have if it wasn't for the evil tape recorder/cd-burner/napster/p2p users. The record industry would have made trillions of dollars but for that technology and the taxes on their earnings would have paid off the national debt three times over by now.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Good luck collecting?
Or they 'graciously' settle for 1% and still laugh all the way to the bank.
$15 billion? From Limewire LLC?! Methinks you're off by a couple orders of magnitude...
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
That value seems out of range, considering that you could finance two wars, clean up the BP spill and probably have enough left over to coat New Orleans in gold leaf...
That's their goal, it was going to be a nice surprise for the rest of us, but now you've kind of ruined it...
Not that the RIAA is making shit up, but that people still use LimeWire? Even my computer handicapped friends dumped that program because of the infestations it was ripe with. FrostWire next I guess. Then the torrent community!
Except profits are parked in the Caymans and all they show in the U.S. are year-on-year losses.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I would flip over to Syphy channel and watch this movie.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Limewire doesn't owe anything. It's simply a tool. Nothing more.
but definitely an added benefit to owning a GPS.
Rather than spending all of this money on tracking down "pirates" maybe the RIAA should actually consult with some of these folks and work out a better way to market music.
Saying Limewire owes the RIAA anything for helping people to pirate music is like saying Ford owes governments and peoples billions for aiding robbers and criminals get to and from crime scenes. It's total BS. In addition, there is no way that everyone would download as many songs if they had to pay for them. I, and many of my friends have 4000 songs plus. Do we really have 4K to spend on music? Not a chance! I might have the budget for $100, 2.5%. Therefore, if one could logically deduce that Limewire owes the RIAA, if anyone for that matter, then 37.5 billion would be much closer, which for the RIAA, probably isn't very much. But even then, piracy helps to advertise certain music, and increases concert revenue, so even if Limewire caused the the music industy to make 37.5 billion less from iTunes and CD sales, they likely made that back in the increased popularity of bands, and therefore higher attendance and higher ticket prices at concerts, and the increased sale of band merchandise.
RIAA is a bit silly. But in all honesty, illegal sharing of media needs to stop.
The people who hide behind dumb excuses as to why they can illegally share media are the ones to blame. They simply feed RIAA.
Don't stop p2p file sharing. Grow up and stop sharing copyrighted material.
If they're going after Limewire like this, they might go after Gopher next!
While we are talking about putting that value in perspective, 1.5 trillion is just over 10% of the US GDP in 2008.
The idea that Limewire somehow owes damages equivalent to 1/10th of an entire year's output of the economy of the United States boggles the mind.
Intimidate for profits! When people don't want to buy, we threaten to sue them for astronomical sums of money. We scare them into buying. The only difference between RIAA and La Cosa Nostra is that RIAA cannot kill you, although I am sure, given the opportunity, RIAA would love to try.
I'm surprised they didn't ask for "eleventy bagillion".
If they're making up numbers they should have said 3 trillion. Then the government will hire thousands to go out and make sure that gets collected because then they can tax the profits. This along with the 41.5 billion from the portable game industry added to the whatever from the non-portable game industry and let's add the whopper number in from the movies and well sh*t we can all just retire.
I smell hyperbole:
"Now it looks as though one Kelly M. Klaus (right) of Munger, Tolles & Olson, yet another RIAA posse, wants Wood to order LimeWire owner Mark Gorton to pay $1,500,000,000,000 for 200,000,000 alleged downloads, at $750 per."
"It looks like" reads to me like speculation on the part of the author, and given there's no source for this quote from Kelly M Klaus we have no idea what he actually said.
Great headline, but I call bullshit.
Okay? Why not just say how much money is owed from everyone that has ever downloaded music in the history of the Internet? Pointless making statements like this... maybe to scare off others. This will never be paid in a million years. And 1.5 trillion... I'm sure is an estimate. If you count all of the music downloaded over the years from WinMX, Kazaa, LimeWire, Bearshare, etc... back when music CDs were a lot more expensive... well, I'm sure it'd add up to a lot more.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
..and it's lawyers, like MOST lawyers, need to be lined up against a wall and shot like the bunch of mangy dogs that they are.
The way I see it the RIAA is a bunch of no talent individuals making money off of those that do and essentially owning them and extorting them for their own means. So I ask you who is really the criminal here? I have no need of them as an artist and with current distribution methods have easily made enough off of one album to never have to release another, and still own my soul bitches.
Go ahead RIAA, keep going. Every time you pull another bullshit move like this, you motivate the music sharing community to build software and networks that are more and more decentralized. $1.5 Trillion might just be enough to push someone to build the perfect anonymous P2P network.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
While the RIAA is busy going after all the filesharers and college students, that really don't have the money to pay their extortions anyways, the biggest copyright infringements are right in Washington! They should go after the GOP! They'd probably get a bigger settlement, too!
to actually pay 1.5 Trillion in damages. It is a punitive damage meant to completely shut down the company and keep the liable parties from ever being in business again.
I believe that LimeWire ought to be shut down, and anyone who profited from it should be fined and/or jailed. But the 1.5 trillion figure is just one more example of how the RIAA has totally lost it. (Perhaps I'm being overly generous here; did they ever have it?)
If they had even half a clue, they would realize that pulling stunts like this doesn't scare file sharers. Instead, it makes it harder for people to take the entertainment industry (and their pursuit of copyright infringers) seriously.
In civil suits you can will a million billion gazillion zillion trillion billion dollars - and still not get paid.
The only Too Big To Fail that matters.
Ergo, only Lando Calrissian can save us. It works every time.
Why would they even wanna go to court when they could just buy out all of the record companies and then own the copyrights to all the music and then just close down shop. Didn't the lawyers think of this?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
The RIAA is claiming US$1.5T is owed to an industry that had about US$12.4B of worldwide sales in 2005?
The fallacy (IMO) is in trying to pin the blame for every LimeWire user on the guys who ran LimeWire. Analogous to blaming Ford for everyone who deliberately speeds or runs someone over. It looks like they're wasting time for the sake of bogus arguements ... but all the RIAA lawyers really have to do is run the clock and the lawyer fees to make things bad for the Lime Group.
The RIAA lawyers will be called on blowing smoke, the LimeWire client will get neutered, and 'damages' will be dependent on the quality of the lawyers and the disposition of the judge.
This morning I posted the opinion that if you believe the figures churned out by those that are heavily anti-piracy (BSA, RIAA, MPAA), eliminating piracy would double the GDP of the entire planet overnight. Hyperbole? Well, I didn't think so, though I had one reply that implied it might be.
And this afternoon, we have the RIAA demanding approximately the GDP of Brazil on the basis of damages from one product.
You cannot shut down LIMEWIRE. Shutting down limewire does NOTHING to stop the free version (Frostwire) from being used to access the Gnutella network.
What a bunch of fools.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
1) Claim ridiculous damages from unprovable, alleged crimes
2) Claim poverty due to loss of revenue from what would be otherwise legal sales
3) Go to government with hand out
4) Get bailout, soak the taxpayers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
According to those numbers the RIAA is either slightly larger, or slightly smaller, than Brazil, the world's 8th largest nation by GDP.
How appropriate...
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
They also declared that their members are 63th generation descendants of Gaius Julius Caesar, and therefore entitled to various holdings in egypt and around the mediterranean, in addition to various fiefdoms in Northern europe through Charlemagne.
News at 11.
Read radical news here
That the RIAA owes me infinity dollars!
They're welcome to get them the same way their esteemed ancestors did. Particularly given that Gaius Julius Caesar didn't hold hereditary office...
"These LimeWire folks owe the record labels - what is it clerk? Go ahead, bite the bullet and be vague - one-point-five trillion dollars, which is a whole lotta loot. They ain't got it, and the RIAA and the record labels won't settle for anything less. The RIAA are (reading) a "trade organization that supports and promotes the creative and financial vitality of the major music companies and the obliteration of all other means of distribution." I've heard a lot of worse game plans. But these "other means of distribution" just aren't going away anytime soon, and the RIAA won't stop suing the hell out of everybody until they are stopped. These are a bunch of really sweet guys, but you wouldn't want to share a Galaxy with them, not if they're just gonna keep at it, not if they're not gonna learn to relax a little. I mean it's just gonna be continual nervous time, isn't it, right? Pow, pow, pow, when are they next coming at us? Peaceful coexistence is just right out, right? So hear me, hear me. I've got an idea. LimeWire will hereby deposit one dollar into a savings account paying compound interest. The headquarters of the RIAA and their participating record labels - along with the city of Los Angeles - will be enclosed for perpetuity in an envelope of Slo-Time, inside which life will continue almost infinitely slowly. They will remain encased in the envelope until a) both the amount in the account is equal to or exceeds the one-point-five-trillion dollars owed, plus COLAs natch, and b) all other non-RIAA sanctioned means of music distribution have ceased to exist, which will probably mean the end of all creation. At that point they will be allowed to emerge from the envelope, access the account, and use that money to restart the music industry as they see fit."
By the time the applause in the court had died down, Judiciary Pag was already in the Sens-O-Shower with a rather nice member of the jury that he'd slipped a note to half an hour earlier.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Musicians are artists. Their work should not be copied and distributed without their consent on a mass scale. Why not, you ask. Because it constitutes as theft, unless declared otherwise by the artist or the music company. So what? This is significant because people who have done so in the past have been made examples by massive lawsuits. There is a gray area between right and wrong but I doubt anyone pirates music because they need it to maintain their physical body.
But see, they only have to do that because of the eeeeevvvvviiiiiil pirates. If it wasn't for them, and the bootleggers before them, and whoever was the flavor of the month to blame before them, they would all be stinking rich. Well, richer than they already are. Funny how that works when they are losing money every year, huh? Shouldn't these guys be losing their jobs every year?
If there's anyone wondering just how absurd $1.5 trillion is, consider this. The combined revenue (not profits) for the parent companies (not just the music subsidiaries) of the Big 4 record labels, over the last 5 years, is only about $150-$200 billion.
It seems to me that the punishment never seems to suit the crime. I understand this is not the final judgment but I have always thought lost revenue should be compensated to the cost of material stolen. How does the RIAA come up with the amount per song? becuase the punishment should be the cost of the item stolen plus court costs that is it so as most i see 200mil limewire owes. still not right.
Should we try to create and enforce some sort of Hypocrite clause?! "The accuser (RIAA) of said piracy shall confirm that the proper steps have been taken withing the RIAA to ensure that no computer attached to their network at any time has any form of pirated software/music/Video. and that all licenses can be produced if requested." Im not a lawyer but I hope you get the gist. at the very least we need something to make the RIAA think twice about bring so many fairly frivolous cases to court.
Or maybe they could invest more money into promoting artist that dont suck.
I would like to see proof of that lost revenue/profit. Maybe RIAA owe uncle Sam massive back taxes on Potential Sales.
There is zero proof that a downloaded music track is an actual lose of a sale.
Also, unless my inflation adjustments are wrong, 1.5 trillion in 2009 dollars is Four Times the value in 1921 dollars of the war reparations imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles.
Yup, being a third-party facilitator to some file-sharing is four times as evil as WWI...
Good day, with due respect, trust, and humanity, Im Mr. Sack Marvin a native of Burkina Faso in West African region. I am a senior member of a reputable bank here in Burkina Faso .
Im writing to you in order to propose a business transaction of 1.5 trillion dollars which I believe will be of a great interest to the RIAA. I found your contact while I was doing a private research on the Internet after my fasting & prayers to get a reliable and capable foreign partner that will assist the project of transferring this said fund to them.
This fund belong to a foreign customer of the bank I work with, and no one else knows about the review of this fund and transaction to you except me. I will need your full co-operation to make this transaction manifest because the management of the bank is ready to approve this payment to any foreigner who has correct informations of this deceased account. I will give to you the informations concerning this fund and the late account holder in order to compensate the RIAA for their tremendous losses due to piracy.
Having said, all that is required now is your complete trust and honest cooperation to enable us see this transaction through. At the end of this transaction, you will have .3% of the total amount while .06% will be for me and .01% will be for expenses both parties might have incurred during the process of transferring.
Observe the utmost CONFIDENTIALITY AND SECRECY in this transaction, and be rest assured that this transaction would be most profitable for both of us. Contact me through this email address:
I wish you a pleasant day as I hope to read from you soon.
Yours Sincerely,
Mr. Sack Marvin
Wow, by most estimates the Iraq war only cost about a Trillion. And I don't even think it's up to that yet. The entire financial bailout wasn't a Trillion. So the RIAA is saying that they could pay off a signifgant portion of the US debt if limewire pays up?
And where exactly does Limewire get this money that doesn't exist? Is the entire internet, as a whole, all businesses on the internet combined, even total a Trillion? Does the RIAA really believe they are 10% of GDP? And are they willing to pay taxes on that kind of income?
I think it's high time someone started informing the IRS of the RIAA's tax evasion practices, because I'm sure if they believe that lost sales are $1.5 trillion, then figuring 50% of sales are lost, they should still be owing the goverment taxes on their OTHER $1.5 trillion -- which is money they are obviously hiding.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The recording industry's best year was back in 1999 when they made a little less than $15 billion for the entire year. Essentially with this they're claiming that Limewire put them out 100 years worth of profits? Oh wait, this is the same world we live in where a .99 song is potentially worth $150,000 for copyright infringement, what was I thinking?
RIAA Sues Pet-Owners for $250 Trillion
RIAA Sues Earth for $3.3 Quintillion
http://postpicayune.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-week-in-news.html
GDP is a pretty fuzzy number and hard to conceptualize for me. Perhaps a simpler way of looking at it, in the last fiscal year, the US collected just over a trillion dollars in income taxes.
This guy is arguing that on top of all the money people did spend on music, we would've chosen to spend an additional amount well larger than the IRS managed to collect last year with the force of law and by automatically deducting from most people's pay checks?
There's just no way they can seriously be suggesting this. They have to be trolling.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
...said the lawyer, then proceeded to describe how that much money is worth more than his life and he will sue anyone to get it
Apparently, in the riaa's world it means that they will develop superpowers and start traveling past the speed of light.
freaking morons
So maybe you're the freaking moron for not realizing that superpowers and faster than light travel are not to be expected - and that faster than light travel isn't a superpower.
Is it me or are these people just messed up in the head. Music, the number is millions not trillions. Trillions is reserved for the sex industry. Honestly, None of these record company make trillions. How is that anyone can owe them 5. Time to get off there high horse and give up. Its almost as bad as double click with "Ad blockers are the end of free Internet". Ill talk to them when they pay my ISP bill's.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
If all the music that was ever downloaded was Limewire's fault, does that mean all the downloaders are now off the hook? Will the RIAA have to refund the previous settlements?
RIAA: Limewire owes a kajillion jillion dollars! And until they pay up, we will continue flooding the market with lame hip hop and r&b music!
Shouldn't that convince the RIAA they are doing their business wrong?
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
And not blame them for the short shelf life of mediocre media that's been utterly emasculated of insight and intelligence, to better suit the perceived bland tastes of the populations lowest common denominators.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Naw! At a certain level, once you stop actually physically producing an item or providing a service to a customer and generating income, you are no longer bound by the constraints of 'performance' or 'results'. Instead, you get 'bonuses' and 'profit sharing'.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Its the users who are sharing copyrighted files yet they're seeking damages from LimeWire.
Why? Because it wouldn't be possible to transfer files without limewire?
Why not go all the way up the food chain...
It was written in Java, sue Sun Microsystems / Oracle
What kind of routers were used?... Sue LynkSys.
Sue everyone.
Musicians are artists. Their work should not be copied and distributed without their consent on a mass scale. Why not, you ask. Because it constitutes as theft, unless declared otherwise by the artist or the music company. So what? This is significant because people who have done so in the past have been made examples by massive lawsuits. There is a gray area between right and wrong but I doubt anyone pirates music because they need it to maintain their physical body.
Yes, thank-you for such an original analysis. I'm sure if you continue to repeat this logically broken argument enough times it will magically take on the aura of truth. It worked on you, after all; Somebody obviously fooled you into thinking that information and ideas are property and that only rich people should be allowed to use their eyes, ears and minds.
Oooh! Did I hear your brain just re-boot there? Why, I think I did! Often, people like you hear an idea which doesn't fit their paradigm and promptly forget they heard it. So I'll repeat it for you: "YOU ARE TELLING US THAT ONLY RICH PEOPLE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE THEIR EYES, EARS AND MINDS."
Do not fucking re-boot! THINK! Do it now. I'll wait.
~~~
You see? If you have a brain, you will realize that what we are talking about here is the issue of slavery; Of one caste of society controlling what another caste is allowed to PERCEIVE AND THINK. If you are okay with that, then you are evil and you need to fuck off now. If you are not okay with that, then we can continue with this analysis.
The problem cannot be reconciled with our current money and trade system. This is the issue. Everything else is a sideshow.
Money is a fool's game. It is inadequate for our needs as a species. It limits everything. There are better ways, ones which support artists and do not feed middle-men leach people 98% of the revenue and profits. Those alternative systems are in their fledgling stages of growth right now, but they work. Except greedy power-mongers who like to keep slaves know that the money system as it stands works to their benefit. And so they convince people (fools) to embrace it.
Bottom line: Your ideas are over-simple and faulty. The ideas I am presenting take brain power and work to understand. You believe in work, don't you? Anybody who uses the copying-music-is-theft argument does. So do some of it now. Think.
Because I get exactly where you are coming from and I reject that position because I have considered it and I see how and why it is flawed. Before you reject my ideas, you ALSO need to put in the WORK of understanding them. Slavery is wrong.
-FL
When the RIAA's cash cow "piracy" is gone, what will they do when they have to rely on actual sales to make their money? The 'lawyer' market might get a bit saturated at that time too. :D
It would basically be the temporary death of music, though it would be reborn in a more privatized sort of way. Actually that sounds like a good idea....go ahead, 'kill' piracy and seal your own fate dumb asses. (not that this will ever happen for obvious reasons.)
If anyone ever were truly in need of an old fashioned blanket party, the members of the RIAA and the rest of their crew most definitely are.
Well, how much gold does 1.5 trillion dollars buy?
Well, gold is around 1,235 USD/ounce at the moment. So we could buy 1,21 billion ounces. That's 34,432 tonnes. And to put that into perspective, it is estimated that throughout humanity we have mined between 140,000 and 160,000 tons, so that'd be 21 to 24% percent of all gold ever mined.
At 19.30 g/cm^3, that's 1.618 × 10^9 cm^3 or 1,618 m^3.
But what about gold leaf then? Well, that's about 0.1 micrometer in thickness. And 1,618 m^3 of gold could be made into 16,180 km^2 of gold leaf. That's enough to cover the land of Delaware and Rhode Island twice. New Orleans is trickier - it's only 467.6 km^2 land, but the metro area is 9,726.6 km^2. There's plenty to cover it, but how much should be covered?
However - we're talking about the RIAA here. They wouldn't want to gild a city. But maybe skin in an attempt to kill the evil pirates? We have enough gold leaf to cover 16,180,000,000 m^2 of skin, and the average adult has about two m^2 of skin. In other words they could completely cover 8,090,000,000 people in gold leaf. Plenty more than there are people in the world.
At least now we know how they ended up at the 1,500,000,000,000 dollar figure.
This has to be from the desk of Dr. Evil, Attorney at Law.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
...is that people still use Limewire.
I mean hell, at least if you're going to go the route of suing pirates, go after the much easier and larger BitTorrent and ****** targets. They haven't even touched ****** and it's been around since the eighties, and is STILL the fastest method of downloading!
At least with such technically incompetent adversaries, pirates don't really have to worry about anything for a while.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Brittney Spears would have been able to buy enough drugs to kill herself instead of making us nauseous by plotzing around the stage in a bikini so we can see her fishbelly white flabby ass.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
That value seems out of range, considering that you could finance two wars, clean up the BP spill and probably have enough left over to coat New Orleans in gold leaf...
That's the point, see? We'd have real, working, scarcity-free communism today, if not for those pesky pirates! ~
and of course this will lead to limewire proposing a new final solution.
Let's just tax the RIAA on the 1.5 trillion they think they have (or would have) earned as income.
I hope the judge has sense enough to laugh them out of court and create a precedent unlike none ever seen before....
I have a feeling that if every record label on earth disappeared, we would get by just fine. They act like their industry is as important as farming and manufacturing.
GDP is a pretty fuzzy number and hard to conceptualize for me.
Look at it this way, then: They want 10% of everything we do, own, and earn. They want a tithe. They believe they are gods.
Seriously, are they gonna put a giant frickin' laser on the moon and demand that LimeWire pay them?
Do their lawyers understand what a trillion is?
Oh yes, don't worry, they know exactly how much it is, and they also know exactly how much of it they will skim off as fees.
I would flip over to Syphy channel and watch this movie.
Not me, I would just download the torrent....
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Shouldn't this completely insane request prove to the court that the entire process is out of whack and have it all tossed out and the judgment be used to kill off all other pending suits?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I demand the sum of...one point five TRILLION dollars! Okay no problem. Here's my second plan. Back in the 80's, I had a market game-changing machine that was, in essence, a sophisticated heat beam which we called a "laser." Using these "lasers," we punch tiny pits into a layer of plastic around a compact disc, which we scientists call a "polycarbonite layer"....
Under US Copyright law, damage awards are not necessarily connected to actual damages. The court is given a range (the range depends on whether the infringement is "wilful"), and may assign any damages it considers just from that range -- the plaintiff doesn't have to prove their actual damages. These statutory damages are figured out per act of infringement and the top of the range can be $150,000. To get the $1.5T figure the RIAA is arguing that LimeWire has contributed to 10M cases of infringement, and should be forced to pay the maximum penalty of $150K per. According to US law they are free to make this claim, but the court doesn't have to accept it.
No, 17 USC 504 says statutory damages are determined per work infringed. Thus, to get the claim they're making, they'd have to show that they (a) own 200 million copyrighted works and (b) each and every one was copied or distributed illegally at least once.
As the RIAA has only shown infringement of 30 works, they are waaaaaay the hell off.
BadAnalogyGuy, is that you?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTmXHvGZiSY
I wasn't aware that "as much as possible" was an exact figure.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This is nothing more than Corporate Propaganda
If 'bottomfeeder' and 'pondscum' were not mutually exclusive I'd call those scumbags @ RIAA 'bottomfeeding pondscum' but alas, that is not possible. I'll be gracious and keep it at 'slimy bottomfeeders' which does has a somewhat pondscummy ring to it.
--frank[at]unternet.org
If it weren't for Limewire, the entire Internet-using population of the world would have bought $832.26 worth of music. Each.
Yeah, that sounds highly probable.
Good job it's $ not £
British Trillion is FAR bigger than the American trillian:
http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwords/billion?view=uk
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
And anyone has any further information regarding this?
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/735096--geist-record-industry-faces-liability-over-infringement
but the amount of damages assessed needs to be > profits from doing the business, or else other companies will get into the file sharing business. We see this all the time when the shoe is on the other foot and a corporation is doing something evil and gets a slap on the wrist. Looks like BP is next in line for that treatment. But if we fined BP 1.5 trillion dollars do you think they'd let another spill happen?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The mentality of these claims is not that X gajillion downloads = X gajillion dollars they *would* have made, but X gajillion dollars they *should* have made by the fact of them having been downloaded. This mentality is erroneous, but not for the same reasons.
Oh come on, with the amount of work done here this guy deserves better than a +3
... they reckon they'd singlehandedly be able to pay back 10% of the US foreign debt with their settlement?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
In this case, I regret somewhat that the ludicrously-high numbers would seem to have been made up by P2PNet, not by the RIAA.
P2PNet got that number by taking the $750-$150,000 per infringement damages that are entitled for copyright infringement under US law, and multiplying the lowest figure by the 200 million downloads also mentioned in the legal document they linked to. That only comes to $150bn, rather than $1.5tr, but as the upper bound would be $30tr, I guess that is acceptable.
Unfortunately, that 200m figure is the number of downloads of Lime Wire, not the number of copyright infringements the RIAA are claiming, so there is no real reason to multiply those numbers together. Even the RIAA accepts such a large amount as ludicrous and if you read the actual document, they only claim that "LimeWire’s liability undoubtedly will run into the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars." Note that the RIAA can only get damages for infringements of material covered by their members, that aren't exempt under fair use, aren't done in other jurisdictions and that they can actually "prove" - so this also limits the scope of the damages.
Obviously this is still rather silly as LimeWire should not be liable for anything, but please try to avoid making up numbers - leave that to the professionals at the IFPI, MPA etc.
I'd advice LimeWire to seek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatizing_profits_and_socializing_losses from Obama Administration
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Is this an April fools day joke? Seriously that amount is outrageous. How anyone can take them (RIAA) seriously is just crazy.
This is one of the best arguments for tort reform one could imagine. I seem to recall that worldwide sales of recorded music are in the range of $24 billion. So $1.5 trillion in damages, is... let's see, gotta keep track of the zeros... roughly 62 years of global music industry revenues. That sounds about right, and should roughly compensate the industry for the lost sales.
Dr. Evil: Shit. Oh hell, let's just do what we always do. Hijack some nuclear weapons and hold the world hostage. Yeah? Good! Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that a breakaway Russian Republic called Kreplachistan will be transferring a nuclear warhead to the United Nations in a few days. Here's the plan. We get the warhead and we hold the world ransom for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
Number Two: Don't you think we should ask for *more* than a million dollars? A million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Virtucon alone makes over 9 billion dollars a year!
Dr. Evil: Really? That's a lot of money.
[pause]
Dr. Evil: Okay then, we hold the world ransom for...
Dr. Evil: One... Hundred... BILLION DOLLARS!
Lime Wire - Sure. Next thing RRIA will be saying is that we owe them for not listening to them on the radio and TV.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
people who download music aren't the same people who buy music, and assuming that if you stop everyone from downloading music, you're likely not going to convert 100% of them into paying consumers. they might just say "fuck it."
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I'm not - my words are "Thank you very much" - they just listed out explicitly for me where else I can reliably go to get my free music fix any time they put the freezer on one of the services.
Quite like a public service announcement, all in all. Thanks, RIAA, keep up the good work - we love you !!!!
And as history proved, the reparations imposed on Germany for WWI were unfair and excessive themselves.
Just as long as this also applies to Halliburton and all the other subcontractors from around the world who also fell asleep on the job (and imo BP did, massively- not that I'm an oil exploration expert). Oh and don't forget that the effect of a criminal case on any further deepwater drilling exploration by any oil company would be chilling to say the least. Did you want to keep using your cars then?
It doesn't boggle the mind if you see those numbers for what they really are: Pulled out of someone's bottom.
Are we supposed to believe that file sharing on Limewire does more economic damage than the giant oil spill in the Gulf? Their perspective is highly skewed and outright wrong.
There is no original source saying that the RIAA wanted $1.5 trillion from limewire...it was posted on a blog, it is NOT official news. The blogger was taking things out of context.
Well, exactly. You might as well prosecute Microsoft for the Network Drive feature in Windows.
Dr. Evil: Okay then, we hold the world ransom for... 1.5... trillion... dollars!
What should be considered is, if filesharing were not around, at ALL, would their losses equal $1.5 trillion
from what I can gather the recording industry hit a high in 1999 with 14.5 billion, which means that if the recording industry as a whole just quit and made $0 per year for the next thousand years they would match that high every year with a $1.5 trillion settlement
Dr. Evil: Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that a breakaway Russian Republic called Kreplachistan will be transferring a nuclear warhead to the United Nations in a few days. Here's the plan. We get the warhead and we hold the world ransom for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
Number Two: Don't you think we should ask for *more* than a million dollars? A million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Virtucon alone makes over 9 billion dollars a year!
Dr. Evil: Really? That's a lot of money.
[pause]
Dr. Evil: Okay then, we hold the world ransom for...
Dr. Evil: One... Hundred... BILLION DOLLARS!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTmXHvGZiSY
Copyrights are an anachronism of print media. Modern media is a business model based ultimately on the monitization of trends. Like fashion they have no legitimate need for copyright.
RIAA should just go for comedy value.
Seems the best way to to put this in perspective with the powers that be, would be to refuse to buy ANY products :o)
from the artists, companies & organisations involved. Buy no T-shirts, recordings,or concert tickets.
It is not like the public would be missing out. We still have radio & all those music channels on TV.
The only possible side effect to the consummer would be all those lovely green Dollars still in our pockets
Not a chance. He forgot to account for the buildings. If you include them, it reduces your land coverage, if you exclude them, it increases.
I demand accuracy in my crazy notions, goddammit.