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RIAA Says LimeWire Owes $1.5 Trillion

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the getting-a-little-greedy-guys dept.

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."

6 of 510 comments (clear)

  1. In case anybody still took them seriously... by bcmm · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
    Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
  2. That's 10% of the US GDP by macklin01 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  3. Re:1.5 Trillion?! by MoonBuggy · · Score: 4, Informative

    75,000%, actually.

  4. Not making shit up by l2718 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:1.5 Trillion?! by chad.koehler · · Score: 5, Informative

    2 Billion is pretty far off 1.5 Trillion.

  6. Re:1.5 Trillion?! by tsalmark · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hey, we pay a tax, on all recordable media, to them already.