RIAA Seeks Estimated $97.8 Billion From MTU Student

theodp writes "The Detroit Free Press does the math on the damages sought by the RIAA from the Michigan Technological University student. The total? About $97.8 trillion--yes, trillion with a T--or enough money to buy every CD sold in America last year over again for the next 120,000 years, according to RIAA statistics." Update: 04/05 21:58 GMT by M : The Free Press can do the math, but not very well: the numbers provided show the RIAA is seeking some $97 billion dollars, not trillion. I'm sure the student is *much* happier. Headline updated.

The math is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The article says the student was sharing 652,000 songs, and the RIAA wants $150,000 per song. That's 652,000 * 150,000 = 97.8 billion, not trillion.

Eighth Amendment Problem?

[Sunlighter]

The Eighth Amendment says: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Are we talking about a claim of actual damages? If so, the RIAA is claiming that it and its members would have made up about 99% of the U.S. economy had this one person not pirated that music. Or are we talking about statuatory damages? In that case I think the eighth amendment would come into play -- that part about excessive fines in particular.

Re:They did the math?

[Anonymous Coward]

You got trillion and billion mixed up. The Brittish 'billion' is what American's consider a 'trillion'.

http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/large.html

Re:a little much?

[dougmc]

U.S. gdp is 10.2 trillion...

Yes. Per quarter.

So the RIAA is suing for an *estimated* (the $98T figure is an estimate, don't forget that) 2x the US's annual GNP.

I wonder if they'll take a check :)

Re:Here's a little more math

[xigxag]

they'd have to prove that each album he offered caused 120,000 less copies of that album to be sold.

No, they don't have to prove that. All they have to do is prove to the judge that the copyright violation was "willful" and the Copyright Act [copyright.gov] allows for the judge, at his or her discretion, to impose up to $150,000 in statutory, (not compensatory or punitive) damages [riaa.org] per infringement.

Re:Eighth Amendment Problem?

[chaidawg]

The bill of rights only outlines rights provided by citizens from the government. In a civil suit, where the government is not a party, the constitution has little say.

Re:"Stealing is stealing"

[fyonn]

I agree entirely, I remember last year I heard an ad on the radio from the BSA telling everyone that "copyright infringement is theft". now as we all know, this is completely and utterly not true and so I wrote to the Advertising Standards Authority. I told them of my concern and I even gacve them a court reference to a british court decision (I'm in the UK) where it was said explicitly that copyright infringement is not theft..

you know what? they didn't care. thegist of their reply was "you know what they mean, now shut up and sod off"

I was not very impressed.

dave

These are statutory damages

[DeepRedux]

Under US copyright law, the registered copyright owner can ask for up to $150K per work for willful statutory damages [cornell.edu]. If the infringment is not willful, they can only get up to $30K per work.

Statutory damages do not require that they show any actual loss or that the infringer made any money. They only need to show that they owned the copyright and that infringment occured.

Also, this would be a civil case so the money is for damages, not fines.

Re:Can any students comment?

[Anonymous Coward]

I go to MTU but live off campus. Even with my previous 3 years on campus I had never heard of anyone running this. Most everyone just runs kazaa, napster, limewire, edonkey, etc ... resnet (the dorm 10mbit ISP) had blocked some services for a while with the PR saying all the sharing was taking up bandwidth needed by staff & faculty. I'm sure a group of people lost their MP3 hook-up but with the prevalance of other methods for sharing and the fact that we had fast (up to 800KBps downstreams) from the internet (not LAN) I doubt it will hurt the avalability.

Now on the other hand it has put a pretty big tremmor through the school. The student here was pretty much the CS department brain child ... he came in 2nd or 3rd at the regional ACM programming contest last year and a lot of people know who he is. RIAA did their HW and picked a public person to take down to try and scare everyone else. Honestly I hope there is something the 4 students together can do to maybe counter-sue the RIAA on haraasment/defamation grounds for the unneeded size of the lawsuit. The RIAA may have $$ but some lawyer may see the national press this is getting and start thinking about some face time. Thats probably just wishfull thinking but I can hope.

Re:Eighth Amendment Problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this for criminal charges? I thought this was a "civil" case. IANAL though.

652,000 Songs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to pick on a different number for a while:

652,000 songs that the student was allegedly serving? Even at 15 tracks per CD, that's more than 43,000 CDs. Assuming they're just 3 minute long pop songs (no symphonic movement long tracks), it would take over 11 years to listen to them once, if you worked at it 8 hours a day.

I did a search on Amazon's "Popular Music" section for "CD" and got 4117 hits. 11023 hits on "All Products", which includes computer books with CDs, books about CDs, and whatnot.

Just how many music CDs are in print in the first place? No matter how dedicated a pirate, I doubt this guy has a collection of every track ever laid down on any medium by any musician.

And if the music industry really is churning out this many tracks: no wonder they're crap.

Incidentally, 652,000 * 150,000 = 97.8 billion, not trillion. But it's still a silly number.

Re:Eighth Amendment Problem?

[JeanFiend]

Actually, I didn't think the bill of rights applied to civil law - but I could be wrong.

Re:"Stealing is stealing"

[DeComposer]

So how is listening to the radio not the exact same "stealing" as listening to MP3s?

I can hear the same song a bazillion times and not pay a dime. The only obvious differences are that:
1.) I get to pick which song I hear a bazillion times.
2.)I get to decide when the song starts and stops.

Compared to the audio quality of the original CD, MP3s are not much better than the quality of an FM broadcast.

Some days I feel like excessive greed has turned this country to shit...

Earth's GDP

[sebmol]

97.8 Billion US$ = approx. Earth's accumulated GDP Nov 10, 1998 - Dec 31, 2001.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2000/02/ data/#1

What are busines school's teaching students these days???

off by one trillion error?

[Anonymous Coward]

correct my math if applicable but 652000 * 150000 == 9.78e10 or $97,800,000,000 doesnt that make it $97.8 billion?

s/trillion/billion/

*hopes his elementary school math skills pay off...

Re:They did the math?

[AyeRoxor!]

"That still doesn't negate the point that there is zero chance 4 students caused the RIAA to lose $97.8 billion in sales..."

That DOESNT F**KING MATTER. Please, people, pay attention. There are several ways to sue somebody for money. Compensatory damages COMPENSATE the "victim" for what they lost. Punitive damages PUNISH the committer of the act.

These are PUNITIVE damages and as such, do NOT have to have ANYTHING to do with what atrocity was committed. They only have to comply with the laws regarding maximum punitive damages, which as I understand it, is $150,000 per infraction, adding up to ~$98 billion.

Let me put it another way. If these kids peed on RIAA's toilet seat and the law said you can sue such a person for $98 billion dollars, RIAA would sue, and would have the right to sue under the law, regardless of what RIAA lost because of the pee. This is no different.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Math Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article says that the estimated damages are $150000 per cd with 652000 cds shared.

652000x150000 = 97.8 billion...that right billion with a B, not trillion.

Tell them what you think of them.

[U6H!]

http://www.riaa.org/contact.cfm [riaa.org]

Re:652,000 MP3s?!?

[goofy183]

In another article it is specified that HIS collection was only about 1100 songs. The 650,000 number comes from the number of songs in the FlatLan index he was running ... so he is getting sued for pretty much ALL the MP3s at MTU.

A trillion and a billion are the same thing.

[mindstrm]

In N. America, 1,000,000,000,000 is one trillion.
In Europe, it's one billion.

A N. American "billion" is "thousand million" in Europe.

Re:for that kinda money

[nelsonal]

Sony Music lost money in 2001, the last full year I looked, and I think AOL's music division made a small profit in 2002 (less than 6% of sales, IIRC), overall industry profit is probably less than half a billion in 2002. Although that is sort of a bad measure, since poorly managed companies can eat the lion's share of revenue, and consistantly lose money or eek out a small profit.

Re:Sure, if you say so

[wing.app]

Instead of complaining about how "the man is trying to screw me" or setting up p2p networks to distribute mp3's, I would suggest that people who are against the RIAA and music copyrights work to get the laws changed. We are, it's called civil disobediance.

Re:Sure, if you say so

[Animixer]

> (bandwidth costs money and the mp3's have to originate from a CD at some point)

False. I have an mp3 archive (and an offline lossless-compression archive on AIT) of a good portion of my vinyl, and some 1/4" open-reel tapes.

Trolling? Or just another stupid american?

[anticypher]

(apologies for the US-centric nature of this post)
Americans wonder why people could hate the US so much they flew airplanes into buildings. Americans can't grasp with their limited intelligence and stunted ability to reason why most of the world despises them. They are so out of touch with reality, they have to repeat your little mantra constantly to try to keep the truth at bay. The complete fiction of your post shows exactly why America is in for a long, rough ride over the next decades, until it once again learns humility and respect.

Sure, there's some dumb ... laws ad nauseum, but as of right now (forgoing the orwellian near future, for a moment), there is simply no better place to be

Start with the fucked up state of the American justice system, which allows (encourages) large corporations to write the laws. That's the original topic of this thread, the RIAA has turned a simple copyright dispute into a major theft crime, with punishments far exceeding any other property theft crime. Its not just a few laws which are fucked up, its most of them. And its not just americans suffering under those orwellian laws, citizens in other countries also have to fear the long reach of American laws. The FBI, the military, the CIA, and other enforcement groups have kidnapped citizens from all over the world to bring them to the US to stand trial, but the US threatens any country which puts a US citizen on trial. The US constantly demands extradition of other country's citizens, but hasn't once in the last 35 years extradited an American to another country to stand trial.

You live in a country with an incredibly good road system.

America has overextended its road system, which has led to a huge shortfall in maintenance. I've driven around the US twice now, and found the roads away from the interstates to be in appalling shape. Big cities in the poorer parts of the country have really poor maintenance, lack of street signs, non-functional traffic lights, potholes big enough to break axles. Most western countries have far superior road systems, you just have never left the US and driven on truly well kept modern roads.

You have running water. Reliably. You have indoor plumbing.

You obviously don't live in a large east coast city. About 5% of americans in large cities don't have access to indoor plumbing. That figure climbs to about 8% in rural areas. Compare that to the UKs 3% figure, or Denmarks less than 2% figure.

I can drink the water anywhere in this nation without fear.

Then you have never been to western Nevada, where the arsenic in the tap water is well above lethal levels. Or Love Canal. Did you see the movie Erin Brockovitch, about a power company poisoning the water table for a whole bunch of communities in California, which killed hundreds of people over a couple of decades, with the "authorities" ignoring all tests showing how bad the contamination was?

You have readily available food.

Unless you look at statistics on malnutrition in the OECD countries, and realize the US has the highest per capita problem of starvation and lack of proper food distribution. Paradoxically, Americans are the most overweight, and the most obese people on the planet. 69% are overweight, and 32% are obese. The next highest countries have figures like 40% overweight and 12% obese. France has declared a national problem, because 5% of the population are considered obese, when the number had been less than 2% until the last decade.

You have electricity.

Unless you live in the western US, where due to criminal actions by a number of large corporations, the electicity supply over the last few years have brought the US down to 3rd world status for reliability and price. Most of the world has reliable electricity.

You don't have to fear for your life walking down the street (well, in some places, you do, but it's safer here than much of the rest of the world)