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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."
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.
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.
$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
No, send a couple Zimbabwe trillion dollar bills, then demand half a trillion in change.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
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...
If it's theatre that we're paying for, shouldn't we get to watch it? Oh no, we would manipulate it if we could watch it.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
...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.
No. It is a civil case and you should only be able to sue in a civil case for the following, money lost, time lost, litigation fees for having to take you to court. The purpose of civil cases are not to punish but to compensate.
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.
the $750 per infringement is per work, not per file. Are they really claiming that they have identified 200 million separate works?
...if a single company failing could put us into a recession, then that company should be regulated to prevent that from happening
How exactly do you think that anybody can regulate a company to keep it from failing? What generally happens is that the government regulates an economically critical industry, this leads to new companies from being able to enter the field. One or more of the big players screw up (or sometimes do it on purpose). This leads to demands for greater government regulation. The result of the greater regulation is that the smaller companies can no longer afford to compete. Rinse and repeat.
As an example look at the financial regulation bills that Congress is considering. They will require massive increases on the paperwork that banks have to file. The cost of these new regulations will be more than small banks will be able to afford, so they will get bought out by the banks that were the ones that everyone is saying were the cause of the problem. Making those banks even bigger.
If a company is "too big to fail" and the government needs to bail it out, as soon as things stabilize (and maybe before) it should be split into smaller companies.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
That's maybe how you'd like it to be, but in practice it isn't. For example triple damages have been used quite a bit. Statutory minimums means you don't have to prove any damage at all. However, claims like these are just bizarre. Imagine, for one little moment that LimeWire had 1.5 trillion, you couldn't say this was actual damages or even triple damages it'd just be massive cash grab.
Even in civil cases they want it to work so that most people and companies stay honest. If the absolutely worst you could end up with in civil court is to pay what you rightfully owed, then everybody would try to cheat as much as possible. But this... I've had to deal with a few US template contracts at international companies even though I'm not in the US, and the more I see of the US system the more I see why they're filled with 100 pages of CYA. Else you get the silliest of lawsuits bleeding you to death.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
More googly searching shows 1.5 trillion would be on the low end of some of the claims of how much is owed for reparations for slavery in the US.
It's way more than the reparations paid out to holocaust survivors, even after inflation.
It's higher than the some claims of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What it proves is how music labels have been inflating their damages by a ridiculous margin, and should call into question many of their legal practices and the judgements in their favor.
I'll see your Iranian Reals, and raise you "Pre-1996" Zimbawean Dollars
Hello, Mr Ebagum Trebor, we'd like 559,950,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of your terrorist "Pre-1996" Zimbawean Dollars.
If BP was sued for the same percentage of punitive damages that individual pirates are sued for, they'd have to invent a new prefix to stand for all the zeros, because I don't think centillion would cut it.
And I think you'd consider that unfair too.
The way I see it, the issue is that we should not be setting a precedent of awarding ludicrous amounts of money. If Limewire is ordered to pay over a trillion dollars, it allows the copyright lobby to hold the threat of similar payouts over the heads over more innocent companies, should those companies do something the lobby does not approve of. The fact that Limewire happens to install spyware does not mean it is a good thing for an absurd ruling against them.
Palm trees and 8
He. Then even by their wrong maths they are wrong. If they base the "$750 per song" on the assumption that "other people" also downloaded the song on one hand, then that becomes void when they apply that $750 to everybody who downloaded the song on the other hand.
Stupid bought-out legal system.
I think the issue is that the numbers are a bit wrong. If BP were charged the same markup on actual damages as this guy is saying is fair to charge Limewire they would owe literally quadrillions of dollars or basically more money than exists or is expected to exist for a long time.
It is a civil case and you should only be able to sue in a civil case for the following, money lost, time lost, litigation fees for having to take you to court. The purpose of civil cases are not to punish but to compensate.
I don't mean to nitpick, but in the U.S. civil court system at least, punitive damages are available under certain circumstances (and they are very often claimed, not as often awarded). But in this case, $750 doesn't necessarily even include punitive damages: because money lost includes "lost profits" (expectation damages in contracts, consequential damages in torts). If they can show, with preponderance of the evidence, that because you shared one song, 10 people who otherwise would have paid for it did not, you can be liable for those 10 lost sales.
One big flaw in their evidence is that (from what I understand) they argue that a song downloaded is a song that would otherwise have been purchased - which completely defies any basic principles of economics (price/demand curve).
I think we can all agree that $750/song or $1.5 trillion total sounds just absurd.
This space up for 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...
One big flaw in their evidence is that (from what I understand) they argue that a song downloaded is a song that would otherwise have been purchased - which completely defies any basic principles of economics (price/demand curve).
That's not so clear to me. If somebody starts throwing out free songs, it doesn't change "where people are on the demand curve". It shifts the supply curve. To the left. A lot. So free music acts like a tax and incurs a deadweight loss that the supplier has to bear.
After all, I am strangely colored.
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.
Individual sharers SHOULD be held accountable. For a reasonable amount. 75k is NOT a reasonable amount per song.
Say they share it to 1-1 ratio... which in itself is questionable whether the person did that (I know that I don't). That's one (one) copy of the song. That's worth $1.00. We'll completely ignore the whole 'other downloader would very, very likely have never bought the song legally' aspect... that's besides the point.
So charge them say... $20 per song they allow for upload. That's a full 20 times the value of the song. In fact, THAT is ludicrously too high, since it didn't devalue the song, nor deprive the ability of the company a copy of the product to sell, since it's not physical. But stick with me here... $20 for the sake of argument.
Say said person was tagged for having 100 songs. That's $2000. That's a damn painful shot to the kidneys for most people, and will indeed teach them a lesson. But it won't ruin their life, and cause them to live as a homeless bum the rest of their lives, versus the... $7.5 million on the other end of the scale.