RIAA request for trillions in LimeWire copyright case is 'absurd,' judge says (72 Trillion!)

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) estimates that filesharing website LimeWire owes it over $72 trillion dollars (£46 trillion) in damages.

In October 2010, Limewire was forced to shut down after a judge in the Federal District Court ruled that its main filesharing functions be disabled, but the RIAA is still actively pursuing its owners for damages.

Given that the combined wealth of the entire planet is around $60 trillion (£38 trillion), the RIAA likely has no hope of securing this in damages, but believe this is what it is owed, reports Computerworld.com.

Interesting that in this story they mention total global wealth at 60 trillion dollars.

Now compare that to our national debt.

Now explain how we can tax our way out of it. Can’t do it.

“An award based on the RIAA calculations would amount to “more money than the entire music industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877,” Woodsaid in her ruling.”

Well, there you have it. The RIAA might have figured out that it’s much more profitable to wait for people to illegally download the song, and then hit them for a fine that is much more than the cost of the song, than it is to sell the songs themselves. A good number of those illegal downloaders would have never paid anything for the songs if they couldn’t download them for free, so any fines they get from them are found money.

Maybe it’s not a cat and mouse game with the industry trying frantically to stop the downloaders in order to save its business model. Instead, it could be a shell game, where the industry pretends it is against illegal downloading, but in reality, is counting on the activity countinuing in order to base a more profitable business model on the resulting enforcement.

Righthaven, RIAA, patent trolls... are they really that different than the antics of good old fashioned class action attorneys? If conservatives are in favor of tort reform to guard businesses against an enterprise based on legal harassment, should we also be in favor of Intellectual Property reform to protect individuals from similar treatment?

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