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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."
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?
Unless Mr. Burns owns Limewire, I doubt they'll ever see even a tiny fraction of that $1,500,000,000,000.
Many of the claims by the record labels are bupkis. It seems to be their business model. Instead of changing and embracing digital tech, they fear it, call it blasphemes, and sue the pants off of dead people et al. If I knew anyone personally who had been sued I'd jump o the piracy bandwagon to, I could not support and industry that will forcefully try to remove money from the people its suppose to cater to. 1.5 T is ridiculous. (I wonder how many sales have been generated by downloaders liking an artist and buying the latest CD?)
Scott
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.
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.
Since when is 750% markup on punishment not cruel or unusual? That is like saying I steal a car, now I owe $15 million to the person I stole it to. True, there are criminal charges with stealing a car, but there would be civil ones 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...
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
Heh, I love how there are companies that are "Too Big To Fail" yet they aren't "Too Big to Require Regulation" I dunno about you, but if a single company failing could put us into a recession, then that company should be regulated to prevent that from happening.
The amount is obviously ridiculous, but it's been pretty obvious for years now that the only people who use limewire are people who are pirating music and people who are distributing viruses in order to create botnets using the computers of people who are pirating music. Limewire basically makes money from other peoples' desire to do something that the courts have repeatedly ruled is illegal, and unless they have some really amazing lawyers they're probably going to lose. They won't pay $1.5 trillion of course, but the RIAA doesn't really want the money, they want to shut down the service (and the company) for good, or at least turn it into a pathetic music industry puppet like Napster became after it lost its court cases.
Of course, Limewire basically makes its money by loading up its users' computers with spyware and other assorted nastiness, so it's not like it would be a huge loss to see them go away.
My interpretation of the headline:
"RIAA declares LimeWire saved the economy from spending $1.5 Trillion on shitty music it didn't really need, and at least $1.4 Trillion of which wasn't worth listening to a second time anyway"
When the numbers you throw around are significantly larger than your industry's profits from the better part of a century, and start to close in on a fraction of the GDP, you sure make it easy to poke fun at you. Do they really think anyone is going to, for even a second, believe that they would have made $1.5 trillion dollars had it not been for one crappy P2P tool? OMGLOL
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.
Yeah, cause the best way to respond is to do something that is guaranteed to piss off the court and get yourself into a bigger mess.
What are they going to do? Throw you in prison? Oh noes, contempt of court charges! You can take the fine out of my bank account that is currently overdrawn to the tune of $-1,500,000,000,000.00
If you ever put me that far into debt, it's like tunneling through the world and coming out the other side, the punishment loops around. You have set the punishment to such a ridiculous level that you have effectively made me my own sovereign entity since nothing you can do starts to approach what you have already done.
And no, I don't consider threat of prison to be greater than eternal slavery.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
TFA: $1.5T; 200m downloads @ $750 per
That's not how copyright statutory damages work. It's per work infringed not number of times the work was infringed. You would have to cite that you owned 200,000,000 (or at the very least 600,600) works and that all of them were copied illegally by the proposed system to get that far. Even then it's pretty remote for vicarious/inducement liability. Copyright has statutory damages due to the general rules against presuming damages. Statutory damages are your option if you wish to not prove the exact damages. I wouldn't be surprised if Limewire made a Rule 11 (b) motion to sanction this pleading. It's REALLY POOR. The UPPER limit of the presumable damages for this action are the 30 songs named in the complaint times the ~$250k in statutory damages available. That's ~$7.5M.
No, I'm talking about the cap. The oil companies lobbied for a cap of 75 million on environmental disasters that could cost billions. How is it that the liability on something like P2P file sharing is in the trillions when there are virtually zero real costs to ending it's impact on the injured party?
It represents an imbalance that is pretty bleeding obvious.
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...
But the record industry only made 13.7 billion in 2001. If we use that figure limewire would have to have been going almost 110 years if it took away all of the record industries sales to even get close to 1.5 trillion, if we did actual damages.
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...
The curious thing about all of this is that the general sentiment is:
Civil Suit vs. BP = We Need Punatives!!
Civil Suit vs. individual pirates = Punatives are unfair!!!
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.
If Limewire is smart, they will not try to argue this amount down. they should keep letting the lawyers demand 1.5 trillion. It will help shine light on how excessive and non-realistic the penalties are.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
No, the more accurate sentiment would be:
Civil suit vs individual pirates = Punatives are unfair
Civil suit vs BP = Compensate people for the damage you caused
Criminal suit against BP = This should happen
The flaw in your logic is conflating the ideas of civil and criminal court. If someone steals my wallet and gets caught, odds are that they'll never pay me back. They'll get community service, maybe jail, maybe a warning, but they will not have to pay me back. This is punishment, rather than compensation. If I sue the same guy in civil court, that is for compensation, not punishment - thus I can't just ask for 1000000% of what was in my wallet as punishment.
Be smart, help people!
No, he's doing a good job of pointing out how ridiculous the number is.
You are doing a good job of lawyer-speak. Do you work for the RIAA?
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.
Civil Suit vs. BP = We Need Punatives!!
Civil Suit vs. individual pirates = Punatives are unfair!!!"
Hmm, well, lessee...how many peoples' lives ruined, wildlife killed, physical devastation, economic repercussions for decades, destruction of fully 1/3 of the seafood supply for the US, and generations of a way of life have the "music pirates' caused with downloading songs?
I think it is more of a "let the punishment fit the crime" type thing...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
There are plenty of ways to regulate without hurting incoming businesses to the market. Forcing corporations to keep a certain amount of cash on hand to handle any hiccups would be one way. Yeah, they wouldn't be able to grow as fast as smaller companies, but that isn't as bad as shrinking the entire economy.
Also, it would be easy for Congress to make it so that bank reform only affects financial institutions over a certain value. Your local bank won't be affected, but big huge banks would. Small banks failing don't destroy the national economy.
At least now I know Limewire is still alive and kicking. I hadn't thought of it in ages.
I drank what? -- Socrates
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.
I'm a little more nuanced... there SHOULD be punatives, but they should not go to the plaintiff. I'm open to where they should go - perhaps to a legal fund of some kind.
BP should get sued heavily and hard, but the punitive damages should not go to the fishermen et al. Similarly, the RIAA should not get more than damages and possibly legal costs. Winning a court case should not be like winning the lottery.
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Agreed, but we saw this coming, in fact I saw this coming a year and a half ago when I posted this comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1095153&cid=26492161 with some quick math that put an estimate at around $2 Billion. Not bad for back of the envelope math.
Visualize Whirled Peas
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.
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.
In other words, we Europeans are just as crazy as the Americans, but we don't even have the courage or the wits to be original about it. Instead we are content to be America's docile little lapdog. That's hardly a cause to boast, is it?
If a company is "Too Big To Fail(TM)" they probably got to that point by exploiting existing regulation and/or politicians. I would rather see failing companies fail so the resources they have can be reallocated to more worthwhile uses. If you try to regulate away the natural consequences for stupid and risky behavior, you encourage more stupid and risky behavior, and it's necessary descendant, failure. "Failure" is not a bad word. Failure is life. Failure is necessary. Without some means of saying "this is bad", we will waste limited resources on endless streams of bad ideas.
And remember, your and my idea of "Good" and "Bad" may not be shared with the rest of the market in general. Put your ideas out there, let the market decide. If the market says bad, move on.
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.
To put that number in context: There are currently 8 countries on Earth with a GDP higher than that.
The RIAA claims that if it wasn't for those meddling Limewire, they'd made more money than the entire population and industry of Canada in a year.
There are some situations where the award of more than actual damages in a civil suit is a good idea. Or at the least, reasonably arguable as a good idea.
For example, in our state, the civil conversion law allows for treble damages. Conversion being the civil equivalent of theft. If I "convert" $5000 of your cash, or a widget of yours worth $5000, should I just be required to pay you $5000?
You can see the problems with that - it basically turns everyone into a merchant of all their possessions. If you won't voluntarily give or sell me something of yours that I want, I can force a sale just by taking it.
So the law allows for treble damages, not just as pure out-of-pocket compensation, but as an additional deterrent.
Punitive damages don't always work the same way, but in some contexts, the deterrent effect is one of the motivating principles. If people and corporations are going to engage in "efficient torts," the law will sometime put its thumb on the scale of the "cost" side of the cost/benefit analysis, to discourage the conduct in question.
As always, the devil is in the details - does such a rule make sense for the tort in question, and is the amount of the punitive damage reasonable?
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.
When downloading songs destroys the Louisiana bayou we'll talk again.
When downloading songs kills the fishing industry that supplies 1/3 of the seafood in the US, we'll talk again
Until then, STFU.
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.
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.
Interesting theory, but going after MS and Apple doesn't really fit the RIAA's style. MS and Apple can afford scary lawyers and fight back.
Honestly, I don't even think this is about making money for the RIAA anymore. I think they're past that point. Most of the people they sue can't afford anywhere near the number they throw around, and then end up settling for amounts that are pocket change as far as the RIAA is concerned. Basically, they're watching their business model becoming obsolete, there's nothing they can do about it, and so they're just throwing big temper tantrums. They know that they're sinking, and are just trying to take down whoever they can with them, just out of spite.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
No, intellectual property misusers and huge corporation should both be held responsible for covering the cost of any actual damages they contribute to. With the downloaders, the actual damages should be about $1 per song, not $20,000 per song. For BP, the actual damages run into billions of dollars. Also, since the downloader's infringement is arguably intentional, while the heartless corporation's misdeeds are arguably "accidental", only the downloader should be charged treble damages. Individual pirates should pay their $3 per song, and BP should pay tens of billions. Arguing that the penalty assessed for "piracy" is excessive is not the same as arguing that there should be no penalty at all.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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?
I agree with you that the availability of free songs shifts the supply curve, but that's not really my point.
From what I understand (I could be wrong), their argument is that everyone who downloaded the song for free would have paid the full price for it if it wasn't available free. If you were to draw that, you get a flat demand curve, where the demand is the same at a price of $0 as at a price significantly greater than that. Surely the demand for music isn't price-insensitive.
This space up for sale.
Let's look at the score.
Deaths: 11 for BP, 0 for pirates.
Damages from oil spill: tourist industry, fishing industry, land erosion from loss of vegetation, infrastructure, plus of course direct costs from deploying booms, skimmers, dispersants, dredging for sand to make berms, the expense of the many failed attempts to stop the leak, and the direct losses of all that oil that isn't being collected for refinement, the loss of the drilling platform, etc. Damages from piracy: entirely hypothetical. Could even be $0, or negative! But we really do not know. There seems to be a lack of unbiased studies that take into account such very basic things as the law of supply and demand, the beneficial effects of advertising, the savings to be had from going digital and eliminating packaging and delivery expenses, and so on.
I expect some of those responsible for the oil spill will go to jail. They certainly deserve it.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Sorry, that is last decade's argument.
Between all you can eat Zune Pass, streaming radio Pandora, digital ecosystem iTunes, and unencumbered MP3's from Amazon, music is now available in pretty much any digital format, with any sort of imaginable payment scheme.
~10 years ago I made a post similar to yours. Back then I was unable to legally purchase MP3s of the music I wanted. That has changed.
Instead argue about fair use possibilities for lime wire or something else like that.
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Each user is potentially contributing to the theft of the song but you can't say there were 100,000 illegal downloads of the song and each user is responsible for 100,000 thefts creating 400,000 thefts. If user D never shared it, the number of thefts would probably still be the same unless someone got queued up and canceled their download.
If someone decided it was taking to long to steal a song then you can imagine their desire to obtain the song was probably not that great in the first place meaning they probably wouldn't have bought it.
Sorry to be pedantic, but copyright infringement is not theft. It is not stealing. It is not piracy. It is copyright infringement.
Please do not fall for the brainwashing.
Conflating these terms is intentional on the part of the music, movie, and software industries and is a deliberate attempt to create the impression that infringers are criminals and deserving of punishment.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
This is problematic. If a copyright holder can only sue for damages, there's zero incentive for people to pay for goods. They can take the chance and pirate it. If they're caught, then they just pay the regular fee. Since the piracy detection rate is lower than 100% (significantly lower, I'd wager), an individual will end up paying less overall. Even if the detection rate is at 100% for some people, they're still only paying what they would have had to in the store, anyway.
Now if you're suggesting that there should be criminal penalties for copying a music file, that's another matter. The problem here is that piracy is rampant enough that it's almost impossible to enforce criminally. Imagine the case backlogs.
Oh for fucks sake.
First off CDs are lossy. All Analog to Digital conversions are lossy. CDs are a digital recording of an analog phenomenon, in the process of digitization some data of lost. Thankfully the data is recorded with such high fidelity that you do not notice that loss.
If you think you can notice the difference between a high quality (320kbit/s or higher) MP3 and a CD then you need to have your head examined.
By a shrink.
In other news, printed books frequently have typos in them, photographs do not capture 100% of the visible light spectrum, and television pictures are made up of millions of little dots that quite frankly have lousy color gamut.
I have owned all of 2 physical CDs in my life. I have better things to do with my time. I am not going to go around finding arbitrary excuses for me to pirate music. "Oh those fuckers don't offer music in some-random-weird-format, so I have an excuse to steal everything I want to!!!"
No.
They have made a reasonable effort to offer music in every reasonable format known to mankind.
At this point in time, people can either buy CDs or download digital copies of songs, or buy CDs and rip to some lossless format and deal with everyone else looking at them like they are fucking nuts.
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