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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?
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.
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.
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...
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!!!
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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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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