Update: That’s what we get for posting hastily on a holiday weekend. We — and a great many other sites from CBS News to Business Insider to The Onion — took the below report seriously, but per Mike Masnick at TechDirt, it’s both outdated — Judge Kimba Wood rebuked RIAA’s damage demand as excessive, and the LimeWire case settled for a far lower amount — and more broadly questionable (while the original demands might have reached trillions, and were justly subject to ridicule on that account, the jump to $72 trillion seems to be at best someone’s subjective extrapolation).
Masnick’s story is here. What follows is the original post.
“It’s no secret that LimeWire was once a hotbed of peer-to-peer music piracy, but the RIAA has now attempted to sue it for $72 trillion – more money than exists in the world today. LimeWire was shut down in October 2010, but litigation continues from music bodies around the world…” [Ultimate Guitar]
4 Comments
[…] be downright saddened. However, I promise to be less of a dickhead about it than the RIAA, who is suing Limewire for 72 trillion dollars. That’s more money than there exists in the entire world today. And people wonder why […]
Does anyone know where this $72 trillion figure actually came from? Every source I found cites some other source for the figure.
It appears the story was run without a great deal of fact checking or sourcing.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120524/16265119070/no-riaa-is-not-asking-72-trillion-limewire-bad-reporters-bad.shtml?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
The sad thing is that it is so believable because many people think the RIAA would do just such a thing.
Thanks, gitarcarver, for being the first to catch this. I’ve revised the original post accordingly.