Arbitrary Arbitration
You know, I'm not rich. Google hasn't bought my company yet ... but I'm waiting.
Because of this, $1.65 Trillion (US) seems like a lot of money to me. I mean, you could buy one thousand YouTubes for that! And everyone wants a thousand YouTubes!
So, CyberNet tells me that the RIAA is going to the source and suing the Russian site AllofMP3.com for one thousand YouTubes.
Cybernet says:
The RIAA (yes, I was just as shocked as you
) is suing the website AllofMP3.com on behalf of EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music in the amount of $150,000 for each of the 11 million songs that were downloaded from June to October of 2006. That comes to a lawsuit totaling $1.65 trillion!
As you know, every song you have in your record collection is worth damages of $150,000 each. So, if you rip a CD and give it to your dad, you are laying yourself open to being sued for $150k times the number of songs on the CD.
How do you mitigate these potential damages? Only rip very long songs.
How did they come up with the number? The RIAA went to the scary number generator and said, "What is a very scary number?" It said "I .. think .. $150,000 ... is ... scary." And they went for it. After all, the only thing worse than an arbitrary number is no number at all.
And in the words of Russian AllofMP3.com Musical Terrorist Criminals:
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer
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