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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!
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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 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, NO, NO. BP does not owe anybody anything. The residents of the states owe BP for the oil that their land is illegally impeding from being delivered to Europe via a non standard shipping method!
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.
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.
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...
the $750 per infringement is per work, not per file. Are they really claiming that they have identified 200 million separate works?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.