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).

In my opinion, the woman is just playing dumb.

Besides, I've been reading up on the RIAA a little...Wikipedia says that music sales went UP when Napster was active and music sales went DOWN when the RIAA started litigating.

I also read that the RIAA is suing some Russian website for something like 1.5 TRILLION dollars! They're claiming something in the are of $150,000 of damages per song! Too bad Russia is not accountable to the RIAA...a little out of their jurisdiction, I think.

People are settling out of court because they would rather pay $3,000 than risk a full judgment, even though most cases have been dismissed. The RIAA relies on scare tactics.

Would I be scared if someone was suing me for $70,000? You bet!

I've shared over 5000 files before .. I don't anymore because OSX's Java can't handle it. And I've seen others share up to 15+ k files or something.

I agree that the lady definitely has room to appeal against such a fine. It's an exagerated fine. They do this for propoganda reasons to show to the media to try to scare people. But they won't report court appeals that knock the fines back to a small $ % of the original fine.

Me to be nice i think it's mostly a bowl of crap.But i think the reason she got busted is because she left her Lime Wire on all day what do you think.

Chris B.....

I hate Worm's
Im geting my blade ready......

http://www.prolarp.org
Pittsburgh Roleplaying Organization
A Live Action Role-Playing group

Lol if ya using a p2p it dont matter if ya left it on all day or all week, they know what data ports are open (your ISP that is) so why not jsut changed the default ports to something different makes it a bit hard for your ISP.

If I own a cd , do I not have the right to give it to anyone I wish ? Or sell it to anyone?
If I go to the flea market or ebay or wherever else and buy a used cd there is no royalty being paid to anyone and that seems to be legal.
What is next ? Are they going to make selling used cd's illegal ?
Sure we all should give back something by buying music from stores or download sites sometimes. Hey the artists do not do it for free. But if you you are just listening to music on your pc and not burning cd's for sale then that should not be illegal.
If I go to your house and listen to a cd am I ripping off the artist because I do not own it ? I think not.

The artists probably make a majority of money on tours anyway

The moment the record industry get into their skulls, that they need to encode their music in better quality and drm free, their sales will pick up even more.

Not that it will help getting the people to start buying from them that they alienated all these years, and by doing that forced them into other ways of obtaining good quality music.

If you get sued just go to court saying that you just couldn't stand the crap encodes and drm they offered

Have an actual news article? Was she sharing 6000 songs or did she download them?

This reminds me of something I posted last summer. Everytime someone upgrades from 45 to LP to CD to whatever comes next... the RIAA has been collecting an immoral windfall. I think it's time to ask what they owe us!
http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showthread.php?t=59951

Good point? How much money have they been making off of the way that data is transfered from them to us, and now that we have some control over it, they cry? When I finally have some control over the technology they want to take it away from me because I might share it. Boo Hoo! I have been through 8 tracks, vinyl, cassettes and now cd's abut one new format every 8-10 years and I'm sick of it. A lot of people I know stopped buying music because they cannot keep up with all the techno changes. They just listen to the radio or don't listen to music at all.
As for movies, anyone I know that actually collects DVD's (a junk piece of shiney plastic if you ask me) buys them used from movie stores or ***** from Wally world and the like, but those people want the original, with the extra features and the pretty box. People who don't care about that stuff will rent them. And it seems to me that more and more people are renting from the net based companies or getting them from p2p sources. Point being? the way media is distributed is changing, and someone is going to get left behind, and for once, it aint us.

This is similar to what has happened so many times in history. A new technology comes along displacing an old one and subsiequently reducing some financial flow and so the people who are loosing money go to the government (courts) and *****. Hey, I got an idea, how about we send these guys all of our cassettes and 8 tracks and vinyl (ok not really the vinyl, but I have to through it in there just for example) and ask for some $ back?