Recording Industry Wants $1 Billion From LimeWire

[maxbailey]

Recording Industry Wants $1 Billion From LimeWire

After winning a ruling against peer-to-peer file-sharing service LimeWire last month, the recording industry has told a federal judge it aims to recoup 'over a billion dollars' from the defendant as well.

U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood ruled in favor of the RIAA in the lawsuit, finding that users of the LimeWire service committed a 'substantial amount of copyright infringement' and that its developer, the Lime Group, did not take 'meaningful steps to mitigate infringement.' In a new court order issued Monday, the RIAA indicated to Judge Wood that the 'amount of statutory damages awarded in this case easily could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars (if not over a billion dollars).'

It's an astronomical sum and yet par for the course for the music industry, which has consistently sought extremely high damages in file-sharing cases, in some cases up to $150,000 per track (conveniently though, media conglomerates rarely perceive the same gravity when outed for piracy themselves). It seems clear that the RIAA is laying the groundwork for an all-out battle to completely destroy LimeWire and the Lime Group along with it.

This is yet another bloody chapter in a long and weary war surrounding content distribution on the Internet. What are your thoughts on the RIAA's ambitions: is it plausible LimeWire deprived them of over $1 billion?