Digital Top Stories

RIAA might demand silly damages from LimeWire

By | Published on Thursday 10 June 2010

Don’t you just love it when record industry lawyers get their damages calculators out? As previously reported, following a recent US court ruling that confirmed the company and man behind the LimeWire P2P network were guilty of copyright infringement, the Recording Industry Association Of America has applied for an injunction to shut the Lime Group’s file-sharing operations down.

Seemingly confident that injunction will now be granted, the RIAA’s legal reps have instead started putting together a claim for damages against Team Lime. And, according to The Guardian, they’re coming up with some pretty big numbers.

As fans of US file-sharing litigation might remember, the minimum damages in American copyright cases is $750 per infringement. Insiders say the RIAA reckons LimeWire has enabled 200 million illegal downloads, and that at least one record industry legal beagle has therefore typed 750 x 200,000,000 into their calculator, which probably resulted in an error, but which would add up to $150,000,000,000, or $150 billion, or £104 billion. As The Guardian points out, the UK’s entire budget deficit for last year (and remember how fucked the country’s finances are, right?) was £156 billion.

Of course, neither the Lime Group nor its founder Mark Gorton have anywhere near that sum of money sitting in a cupboard somewhere, and I’m not sure the $750 per illegal download sum would apply here even if they did. But still, stupidly large damages claims are always amusing. And presumably the more hawkish of the record industry’s lawyers would just be happy with sufficiently large damages so to bankrupt both Lime and its founder.

As also previously reported, LimeWire have a fortnight to respond to the RIAA’s injunction claim.



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