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LimeWire Sued Again, Publishers Seek $150,000 Per Song
betterunixthanunix writes "Another lawsuit has been filed against LimeWire, this time by the National Music Publishers Association. They claim that LimeWire also damaged them, and seek $150,000 per infringement, putting the maximum possible damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. LimeWire seems to have become the latest music industry punching bag. 'David Israelite, chief executive of the publishers' association, said his organization had decided to bring the complaint because most publishers were not represented in the record company lawsuit and they were now confident that they had a winning case. ... LimeWire, which says it is trying to start a new paid subscription model, said in a statement on Wednesday that it welcomed the publishers to the table. '"
Sorry, but NO song is worth that much.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
$0.15/song maybe, but certainly not $150k/song
$150,000/song? Why not all of the money on the planet Earth or anything of value in solar system? That sounds like a more reasonable sum.
Why not sue CD-Drive manufactures, for allowing cds to be downloaded to harddrives to be shared. Sue Cisco for allowing p2p traffic to go across their networks. Sue Microsoft just because they suck. Or you could work on adjusting your failing business structure.
I switched to FrostWire a while ago. I'd be interested to see how they try and come after an open source project.
I'm most suprised that people still use LimeWire!
K Man
That's exactly what this sounds like. What we need is a government sanctioned music lending service.
I mean, if we're going to attack the P2P sites of yesteryear, let's go after Morpheus, Kazaa, and Napster while we're at it.
I can't wait for all the sharing sites to be shutdown and the record companies just wont get why sales are still down. Most music is so bad now it's only worth nothing.. as in if it's not free then I just will never listen to it. I own nearly all the music I want and the artists won't be making more anytime soon.
More like, now that someone else won a victory in court, with no valid data to support the verdict, they feel it should be easy enough to point a finger at that verdict and tell the court "me too". Its a lot easier to sit back and wait for someone else to set a legal president and jump on the moving band wagon than it is to push that wagon uphill in the first place. LimeWire may be guilty as hell for aiding and abetting a crime under the US copyright laws, but they did not download any songs, period. To force them to pay 'per song' is a farce no matter what the price, because there is no substantial proof of them ever downloading songs. Someone else did that.
They didn't know that their service was going to be used to reproduce non-free content! It can't be stopped! It's the user's fault, and since they can't be tracked, there's no point suing anyone. It's like suing the MP3 format, TCP, HTTP or Google. It just ain't gonna happen.
If they are getting 150K for ANY song then can I get at least get 100K per song of my greatest hits album. (That people on Limewire might have downloaded by accident).
They target Limewire because they made the mistake of having a company at the forefront of their P2P application. Companies make nice, big targets for lawsuits.
BitTorrent, on the other hand, has the necessity to give people the IP addresses of their peers, since it's a functional requirement to get the data, so the obvious targets are the peers themselves.
*continues downloading through more anonymous means*
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Stop buying RIAA member's products.
It's getting harder to find a grocery store that won't play music of an RIAA label over its speaker system.
The closest thing to a public library would be one of those online jukebox services that charges a monthly fee, such as Napster. Except instead of end users paying the fee, the county would pay the fee out of tax revenue.
I lived in Tokyo for a while about 10 years ago. At that time you could rent CDs at any music store for about $1. I never saw a service like this pop up in the US, but I assume it would have been very popular. I know I would have used it.
Except Limewire hasn't deliberately infringed since it's only just been decided by a court judge that by making it even possible to share, Limewire are contributory infringers.
It's hard to deliberately infringe when it takes a court decision to say whether you are or not...
...that when LimeWire usage peaked there was no really viable online music store in most parts of the world. So basically the publishers ignored the market, the market supplied to it's own demand, and now the publishers seem to think they are entitled to ridiculous sums of money?
Sad.
.: Max Romantschuk
One of the things that I find really unjust about our system, taken as a whole (which is dangerous in a federal system, I know, but bear with me) is that when a normal person is robbed, the state gets to fine the robber and keep the money. The victim of the theft is left with some abstract "justice" in the form of an imprisoned thief and the state pockets the fine instead of transferring it, tax free, to the victim of the theft.
No government, not in the even the feds, turn over the fine directly to the victim of a real theft, but they want to enable $150k in damages for a copy of a song that retails for a $0.99?
The average man gets, at best, a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that "justice is served." He cannot beat or shoot the guy robbing him blind unless the robber is also menacing him, so in many cases, common citizens cannot even use force to defend their property as they see it being stolen. Yet, the feds hand over a court room nuclear weapon to big corporations...
Yeah, that'll end well for the system's legitimacy.
Pardon my ignorance, and I suppose I could use Google and all that... But who uses LimeWire these days? What kind of network is it using, and is there content there that you can't find elsewhere? I've always found a combination of BitTorrent and eMule to work well.
Clever signature text goes here.
Just register the work with the Copyright Office and, if someone rips it off, you could file suit for up to $150,000 statutory damages - see 17 U.S.C. 504(c)(2)
In awarding statutory damages courts may consider, among other factors, the expenses saved and the profits earned by the defendant, the revenues lost by the plaintiff, the deterrent effect on the defendant and third parties and the conduct and attitude of the defendant. Accordingly, statutory damages for willful infringement may be partially punitive in nature and may exceed the amount necessary for compensation.
Of course the trick here is to find legal representation that will be happy to file suit without it costing you an arm and a leg to get to court in the first place... something that those with deep pockets predicate on when they rip off Joe Public...
the founder has gobs of cash:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/business/media/24limewire.html
first wall street trader i ever felt sorry for. his other passion is alternative transportation: he rides his bike to work every day. not your average wall street sleazeball
and he idealistically thought that an honest p2p play was a good idea, downplaying the shortsighted sociopathology of the music publishing industry. bad bet
now if limewire were some open source project with nothing but pseudoanonymous college students behind it, it would still be sued into oblivion, but there would be no follow up lawsuit seeking to drain the defendants of all their worth. this guy, on the other hand, is going to made destitute, simply for the crime of thinking positively about the real future of media. unfortunately, the zombie legal past of media has marked him for death
music industry: the next limewire won't be fronted by anyone, and there will be no way to block it, and no one to sue. the internet has permanently changed the legal status quo of media. you have a bunch of laws from the days of vinyl records, that are simply unenforceable in the age of the internet. your job now is shut up and die, blood sucking assholes
YOU'RE NOT NEEDED ANYMORE. YOU AND YOUR UNENFORCEABLE LAWS ARE A HISTORICAL ANACHRONISM. JUST FUCKING DIE ALREADY
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Seen an ISP display their usage caps?
Our usage cap of 15GB is equivalent to
3000 MP3's
30 CD albums
15 hours of DVD-quality MPEG4 movies
So how come this isn't the same as Limwire's ad? Hell, it's WORSE.
What is the point. Its not like Limewire actually HAS any money. You can sue them for 100 million or 10 Quadrillion, it doesn't matter as you won't ever see it.
The only thing I can see is the industry trying to set precedent for awarding maximum statutory damages. Which IMO is totally wrong in the first place. Does ANY sane person actually really believe that 150k punishment actually suits the crime for COPYING ONE SONG. It is just silly.
so of course its worth a gillion dollars
And you missed the part where it doesn't matter whether there's any piracy at all. All the parent poster said was "our sales are falling. it must be pirates" as used. If there's no evidence of pirates, they must be hiding. they will (and you too) use circular reasoning to ensure that they get paid.
I shamefully admit that I once worked for a company that was responsible for poisoning limewire. We eventually gave up on it because the RIAA didn't want to actually pay for the service.
Good luck with that...
I am sure glad your time is almost up.
Someone else noted that the music industry typically sues people for downloading 10 songs or 20 songs. But why do they never sue anyone for downloading thousands of songs, who are ostensibly "damaging" their industry the most? The answer is that the music industry knows that the big fines are not there as a deterrent to actual crime, but psychological warfare. I am sure there is more than one person in the world who has a 1-TB drive full of songs. According to my calculations, someone could be sued for $35 billion. The public would either laugh, or be outraged.
My question is this: where would the $35 billion in damage be? The punishment is supposed to fit the crime. Ostensibly, if someone is being fined a huge amount of money, they should have caused a proportional amount of harm. In the case of the lowly music downloader, there is no physical or financial harm caused to anyone.
The hypocrisy comes from the cozy treatment of Wall Street, who caused trillions of dollars with risky subprime mortgage speculation. No fines. No jail time. No electric chair. In fact, they were rewarded by Congress with a bailout for their good work and years of service to the party apparatus.
The take home message from Congress: Anger the 1st Estate (the political class), and you're going to jail. Anger the 2nd estate (the corporate elite), and you'll be fined into oblivion. Anger the 3rd estate (the sheeple), and riches will be yours.
For an artist to sue their own record company for $150,000 per song.
Any proposal that involves tax dollars being used to pay for media will be labeled as "socialist" and scaremongerers will undoubtedly claim that it will lead to censorship and oppression.
Palm trees and 8
"Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
so that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah."
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
How to make a $million in easy steps...
1. Make a crap move or song. It doesn't have to be any good, just make it and publish it. The cheaper the better. If you spend more than a few thousand on it, you spent too much.
2. Make all you can selling it. Even if its commercially unsuccessful, you will make a lot of money from it.
3. After your 'first run' (theater/radio whatever) and 'second run' (cd/dvd/direct-to-home whatever) post it to a p2p network.
4. Go running to the authorities! The kiddiez stole my precious, myyyy preciousssssss. They stole it they did! We loves the preciousssss.
5. Get at least $150,000 from the p2p outfit. No, they did not post it. $150,000 may be 500 or 1000 times as much as you spent making it, but sue! They can't prove that you were the one who posted it, but you sure will get money from them. Its almost, kinda like robbery except that you can be the both the criminal and the plaintiff, and the courts can do the stealing for you. In this case Limewire never posted anything infringing, but they are the ones who pay. WIPO created a fucked up system, and now the so called content creators are gaming that system. I have no doubts that record companies have posted content onto p2p systems. The MPAA and RIAA have a great corporate welfare scheme going, and its a growth industry. There are thousands of lawyers who are making millions of dollars taxing people on their own stories and songs. Ideas too. WIPO has created a corporate tax on thoughts. We are currently in a race to see who can own the most ideas, and once an idea is 'owned', anyone else trying to do anything with that idea, even if they didn't know someone else had it, will be taxed on it or be made a 'criminal' for having it. Right now, these ideas are only owned for 100 or 200 years, but wait! Soon (very soon) ideas will be owned in perpetuity.
What about that box i checked off every time i installed it that said "I will not use LimeWire for copyright infringement"?
Legislation was actually passed back then to prevent the rental of music CDs and software. Like I said, no fucking shit. Look it up.
Creedy: Die! Die! Why won't you die?... Why won't you die?
:)
V: Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.
LimeWire could potentially be used for illegal content sharing. So can computers, so the RIAA should sue all the computer manufacturers. For that matter, all users could potentially share illegal files so they'd better sue all of us as well.