I can’t believe anybody really thought paying eighteen dollars to Limewire bought any immunity from anything. Anyway, however naive she has been it still seems excessive to sue her for so much. We are in danger of getting royalty figures out of proportion, because of publicity of the huge figures the plaintiffs always seem to sue for: its only when a record or CD is first bought that royalties are normally paid, if you buy one second-hand you won’t find royalties being claimed or expected. The current price at auction for ‘ordinary’ LPs (ie non-collectable vinyl) is around one english pound (plus twenty four pence auctioneers commission) for one hundred LPs. If royalties account for twenty per cent of the price of a record, with twelve tracks to one LP the royalty per song would be one fifth of one twelfth of one hundredth of a pound. Put a copyright song from one of those LPs in the Limewire Shared File and someone downloads it then what does the copyright holder really lose?- it equates to sixty downloads for one English penny royalty. You might say that if they couldn’t download it free they would go out and buy it new - no they wouldn’t, not usually. But even if they did - I bought two CDs at the weekend, brand new, city High Street music shop, thirty four tracks total, price £1.97 each CD, so even brand new the royalty on them was only two pence per track, (though the author might have a safeguard of a minimum per track or per unit). I have no wish to deprive copyright holders of their just dues but don’t lets get actual lost royalty payments out of perspective.

Perhaps a songwriter or singer would append on this post the current royalty rates. In the USA a few years ago the ‘compulsory licence’ royalty rate was 7.1 cents per composition or 1.35 cents per minute of playing time, whichever was greater, per CD/record. On this figure and if as the poster above says tracks cost 99 cents on-line then the actual royalty in the USA is less than 10%. So although the lady is being sued for 70,000 dollars, even if every one of the six thousand songs she shared had been uploaded once the actual royalty figure lost has been 426 dollars (and that is presuming that every uploader would otherwise have bought the song).