A cool 98$ trillion

Suit to send message to universities
As a follow up to last week's report about the RIAA's lawsuit against several college students, the Detroit Free Press crunches the numbers behind the lawsuit. The lawsuit seeks damages of around $150,000 per song, the maximum allowed by law, and the RIAA claims just one student traded in excess of 652,000 songs. That total winds up around $97.8 trillion, enough money to buy every CD sold in America last year over again for the next 120,000 years. The RIAA's goal is to essentially scare large scale fire traders straight, and to send a message to universities that it's time to better monitor their networks. "My guess is universities are going to be much more concerned than they have in the past," suggests one RIAA spokesman. "I don't think any university wants to see their students sued."

link 1
www.washingtonpost.com...

I think this is just way out of line. I myself do download a sample of artists, but if I like the artist, I purchase the album, not much harm done there. I think the RIAA is going a bit far with this one.

link 2
www.riaa.org...

150,000$ per song. that's a lot of money.


[Edited on 7-4-2003 by Grommer]

Last night I downloaded a bunch of songs, but I already have the cd's that I bought. I just felt like having them on my computer. I tend to download some songs, and if I like the artist I usually go out and buy the cd. This is just ridiculous. I have some friends whose schools have set up firewalls to prevent the transfering of file off of programs like Kazaa.

as they should to protect their own a��e�. the RIAA is trying to come down on everyone and anyone who dares rip the artists off more than they do, so it's mostly the people that are in competition with the RIAA to see who can rip the artist off more. I think in this case the RIAA is winning.

Pffft ... This trend won't last long. The RIAA is so stupid. They don't even understand what they're doing!

Even I download music off of Kazza Lite. Something like this isn't going to stop me anytime soon.

yeh thast right when will the sueing stop, until theyve gotten everyone around the world, i head that the only way to shut down kazaa is for everyone to log off at the same time??

Lakini,

Yea ... That would be the only way to shut Kazza down, but that's something the RIAA can't do ... legally atleast. But why shut it down? That's not for the RIAA to decide anyway's!

you're all right, but they can scare a lot of people, the same way they did with Napster. Obviously this person/persons arent going to be able to pay for that. I think why they're suing is because they were trying to sell it if I read correctly