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."

In case anybody still took them seriously...

[bcmm]

For a sense of scale, that rather silly number is about a thousand times the annual revenue of EMI. Also, this page [pagetutor.com] feels kinda relevant.

That's 10% of the US GDP

[macklin01]

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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not making shit up

[l2718]

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.

Re:1.5 Trillion?!

[chad.koehler]

2 Billion is pretty far off 1.5 Trillion.

Re:1.5 Trillion?!

[tsalmark]

Hey, we pay a tax, on all recordable media, to them already.

Re:1.5 Trillion?!

[aaron552]

Blind A/B tests say you are wrong. You can continue to enjoy your lack of HD space, over sized files, and imaginary perceived quality.

Blind A/B tests say that the majority of people cannot tell the difference for the majority of music. That does not mean that no one can. Audio quality is extremely subjective and removing data through a lossy process can make the audio sound "better" to some people.