Around four years ago, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a lawsuit against LimeWire. The RIAA was suing on behalf of several music labels. In short, the RIAA claimed that LimeWire’s P2P software, which allowed people to download and distribute copyrighted songs for free, caused the music industry to lose millions of dollars. The RIAA won that case. All that was left was to figure out how much LimeWire now owed the RIAA as a result.

The RIAA came up with a figure that most people would find to be astounding. They want LimeWire to pay them $72 trillion. The RIAA feels that since LimeWire allowed thousands, (or maybe millions), of people to illegally download one, or more than one, of the 11,000 songs that the RIAA owns that it means the members of the RIAA are now entitled to statutory damages for every single illegal download that occurred.

Judge Kimba Wood has called that figure “absurd”. Judge Wood went on to say, in a recent decision:

“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.”

If this thread gets heated maybe I will look up the old article I had on this but basically what I have read is that is a load of crap. The ppl that downloaded those songs would have bought them anyway or never would have bought them whether they downloaded them or not. The percentage that would have bought them legit rather than download them was very low.

SOB