RIAA Says LimeWire Owes $1.5 Trillion 510
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."
1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Wait, something like this could work to everyone's advantage:
1.) Set up a company hosting all music and movies to be shared. Encode said files with an identical MD5 checksum, to be used later.
For irony, perhaps use 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0. [slashdot.org]
The checksum will be used as evidence because checksums are very hard to fake. [imdb.com]
2.) Everybody grab whatever they want.
3.) The RIAA/MPAA sues the company for $1.5 trillion, or whatever large number they'd lik
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [slashdot.org] with some quick math that put an estimate at around $2 Billion. Not bad for back of the envelope math.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Insightful)
To put that number in context: There are currently 8 countries on Earth [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
OK. Let's blame Canada.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Funny)
Stop. Talking. Like. Shatner. People. Will. Believe. We. All. Talk. That. Way.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:2)
From TFA: "Now it looks as though one Kelly M. Klaus (right) of Munger, Tolles & Olson, yet another RIAA posse, wants Wood to order LimeWire owner Mark Gorton to pay $1,500,000,000,000 for 200,000,000 alleged downloads, at $750 per."
$750 per song is absolutely ludicrous, not to mention Mark Gorton is not the one who downloaded 200,000,000 songs...
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Civil Suit vs. BP = We Need Punatives!!
Civil Suit vs. individual pirates = Punatives are unfair!!!
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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. Co
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's maybe how you'd like it to be, but in practice it isn't. For example triple damages [wikipedia.org] 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
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Funny)
That's ~$7.5M.
The other one trillion four hundred ninety-nine billion nine hundred ninety-two million five hundred thousand is for lawyer's fees.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! huh (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:1.5 Trillion?! huh (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! huh (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! huh (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Re:1.5 Trillion?! huh (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, how much gold does 1.5 trillion dollars buy?
Well, gold is around 1,235 USD/ounce [goldprice.org] 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.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! huh (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:1.5 Trillion?! huh (Score:4, Interesting)
Yup, being a third-party facilitator to some file-sharing is four times as evil as WWI...
Re:1.5 Trillion?! huh (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
At least now I know Limewire is still alive and kicking. I hadn't thought of it in ages.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:1.5 Trillion?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Deficit reduction! (Score:5, Funny)
Good! Now the U.S. Gov't. needs to seize RIAA. That'll take a sizable chunk out of our $13+ trillion deficit!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Deficit reduction! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Deficit reduction! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Deficit reduction! (Score:5, Funny)
You don't seem to understand economics. Individuals with their "civil rights" are worms, while corporations Too Big to Fail are emerging butterflies, ready to spread their wings and soar. The socialists like you who want to regulate companies are like a giant jackboot on a time traveller ready to squash the butterflies and end all hope for the future, and equally ready to trod underfoot the worms wallowing in their commie dirt like "health care" and "education." It's only the Republitarian Tea Party who wants to save our delicate butterflies from the vicious violations perpetrated upon them by the worms and the boots and the dirty Huns and REMEMBER THE ALAMO.
The economy is like a car: regulation is like how the engine keeps the gasoline exploding in the engine in tiny, controlled bursts that propels the whole car forward, so if you pour enough additives like nitroglycerin into the tank—that is, if you water the tree of liberty—you can liberate those propulsive explosions from the engine's control and blow the whole car up, which will make its individual pieces—individuals and individual responsibility and individual liberty—go much, much faster as the careen flaming across space.
Re:Deficit reduction! (Score:4, Interesting)
...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.
Re:Deficit reduction! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Deficit reduction! (Score:5, Funny)
That'll take a sizable chunk out of our $13+ trillion deficit!
Meh. According to the RIAA, my hard drive is valued over $500 million, but I still have to work for a living.
Btw, anyone wanna buy a hard drive?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
HAHAHAHAHA (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's theatre that we're paying for, shouldn't we get to watch it? Oh no, we would manipulate [wired.com] it if we could watch it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Yeah... (Score:2)
Only a Few Trill, Huh? (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Freddie? Is that you? [wikipedia.org]
Respond appropriately (Score:4, Funny)
The appropriate response to such a statement is a delivery of mint Monopoly® bills to the sum of 1.5 trillion.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ridicul
Re:Respond appropriately (Score:5, Interesting)
Making Shit Up (Score:4, Insightful)
People are going to say that, right?
Not making shit up (Score:5, Informative)
We've been laughing at you for years... (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:We've been laughing at you for years... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Hello, I represent the BCAA (Batshit Crazy Americans Association) and understand that you are in violation of several of our copyrights...
In case anybody still took them seriously... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
That's 10% of the US GDP (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, by this google search [google.com], that amounts to just over 10% of the entire US GDP. Glad somebody's been genuinely productive this year.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:That's 10% of the US GDP (Score:5, Funny)
Nice.
New headline. "RIAA claims piracy more damaging than holocaust."
In that case (Score:2)
And BP owes 75 million? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:And BP owes 75 million? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's do the math here (Score:5, Funny)
Well *obviously* they only made $50B/year because Limewire is stealing all their income! So if Limewire hadn't existed, they would have made every penny of that $1.5 Trillion. And don't try telling me that it's absurd that they would be owed 10% of the entire US GDP. GDP is only a measure of economic output, so obviously if Limewire hadn't stolen all that money, and it had gone to EMI instead, the GDP would have been $1.5 Trillion more than it was!
And since it's known that EMI's revenue is a tiny fraction of the US's GDP, we can only conclude that the GDP would have been several thousands of times higher than it was.
Conclusion: LIMEWIRE IS STEALING TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS FROM THE USA EVERY YEAR!!!!!
Funny Money (Score:5, Interesting)
Right... (Score:2)
Stop it at its source (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stop it at its source (Score:5, Insightful)
This is interresting especially when you see things like this: how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online [informatio...utiful.net]
Re:Stop it at its source (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop it at its source (Score:4, Insightful)
Self publishing and small labels are still a road to obscurity because the big incumbents have spend decades entrenching themselves in the system.
You might not get super-famous doing self-publishing, but if you end up more economically comfortable doing self-publishing you'll see most musicians begging for the chance. The vast majority of musicians (in all styles of music) stay afloat via some combination of performing, teaching, self-published recordings, and very likely a non-musical job. A few are signed to labels, but due to Hollywood accounting the musicians basically make nothing from that kind of deal. A very very very few (e.g. Michael Jackson) will make it really really big.
Basically, your chances of making big bucks as a good musician are about the same as the chance that your average high school football player will end up as an NFL star. And by signing with a label, you give yourself a chance at the big bucks but at the risk of making absolutely nothing. A lot of musicians would much rather have a guaranteed modest income rather than a 0.05% chance at making millions.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well I say self publish AND fuck the radio stations too.
The real reason that the RIAA and the media groups are going after p2p and internet streaming is that they would like to abolish/control a much more flexible and cheaper method of distribution than CDs and radio.
So make your own music. Play it in the park. Share with your friends stream it on the internet and do it for free.
Kurt
All part of the plan... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
off the deep end (Score:5, Interesting)
...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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
RIAA shoots self in foot, I think (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Only 1,500,000,000,000 dollars? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Hey RIAA!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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
Many flies with one hit: ban everything! (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
And I was getting replies suggesting I was nuts... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)