HEATHER NEWMAN: Recording industry has warning: File-sharers have to face the music
I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the kids that got “busted” by the RIAA for using Kazaa. But this caught my eye:
The damages sought by the suits are astronomical: $150,000 per song, the maximum allowed by law. Multiply that by the 652,000 or so songs the RIAA alleges student Joseph Nievelt offered to other Michigan Tech students on his service, and the scope of the suit is clear.
That total? About $97.8 trillion — yes, trillion with a T — or enough money to buy every CD sold in America last year over again for the next 120,000 years, according to RIAA statistics. And that’s just Nievelt’s case.
Now, at first I thought, 652000 songs by an average of 3 megs a song, that’s just shy of 2 terrabytes. What sort of kid has two terrabytes?
But then Brett mentioned that it was probably the number of times he sent a file to someone.
So that means that downloading a file over the internet carries a price tag of $150,000. By visitng my web page – which has just a graphic, a javascript include, and the html – that’s $450,000.
Searching Google Images gives you 20 thumbnails back, plus various extra google graphics (we’ll say 4), plus the HTML – why, that’s 3.75 million dollars.
Why didn’t anyone tell me the internet was so expensive?
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