The music industry wants
LimeWire to pay up to
$75 trillion in damages
after losing a copyright infringement claim. That's right . . . $75
trillion. Manhattan federal Judge Kimba Wood has labeled this request
"absurd."
You're telling me. To put that number into perspective (I bet a lot of you didn't even know "trillion" was a real number), the
U.S. GDP is around 14 trillion
-- less than one fifth of what the music industry is requesting. Heck,
the GDP of the entire world is between 59 and 62 trillion. That's right,
the music industry wants LimeWire to pay more money than exists in the
entire world.
Popular file-sharing service LimeWire was
shut down last October, after Judge Wood found them liable for
copyright infringement in May 2010.
According to Law.com,
the RIAA and the 13 record companies that are suing LimeWire for
copyright infringement have demanded damages ranging from $400 billion
to $75 trillion, and have claimed that Section 504(c)(1) of the
Copyright Act allow them to request damages for each instance of
infringement where two or more parties were liable. In other words, the
RIAA thinks it should be entitled to damages not only for the individual
works, but for every time that work was infringed (i.e. downloaded by
another user).
At the moment, about 11,000 songs have been identified as
"infringed" material, and each song has probably been downloaded
thousands of times. The RIAA thinks it should be compensated for each
individual download.
Judge Wood disagrees. In
a 14-page ruling (PDF),
Judge Wood said that the music industry is entitled only to a "single
statutory damage award from Defendants per work infringed," for several
reasons, including "Absurd Result." According to the document, the
"Plaintiffs' position on statutory damages also offends the 'canon that
we should avoid endorsing statutory interpretations that would lead to
absurd results.'"
The document goes on to read: "As it stands now, Defendants face a
damage award that 'could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if
not over a billion dollars.'"
Judge Wood also points out that "if one multiplies the maximum
statutory damage award ($150,000) by approximately 10,000 post-1972
works, Defendants face a potential award of over a billion dollars in
statutory damages alone. If Plaintiffs were able to pursue a statutory
damage theory predicated on the number of direct infringers per work,
Defendants' damages could reach into the trillions. As Defendants note,
Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is 'more money than the entire
music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the
phonograph in 1877.'"
This "absurd results" clause isn't anything new, Judge Wood points
out. She mentions the 2010 Arista Records LLC v. Usenet.com, Inc. case,
in which Arista Records requested the court calculate the damages by
multiplying the maximum amount of damages ($150,000) by the number of
infringements (878), or $131,700,000. The court found the defendants
liable for $6,585,000, by multiplying the number of infringements by
$7,500.
Unfortunately, this still isn't great news for LimeWire -- while
Judge Wood says the music industry is entitled to only a single
statutory damage award per infringed work, there are still 11,000 works.
That means LimeWire could still be liable for damages in excess of one
billion.
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