Legal Research

Record industry still in cloud cuckoo land

By scott

“Plaintiffs [the record companies] are suggesting an award that is more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877.” Judge Kimba Wood

This quote from the latest arguments in the Arista v Limewire case (in this instance the question of how damages would be worked out in the upcoming damages court proceedings) could be added to the things in Mark Mulligan’s excellent list of why the Music Industry Is Fucked.

For those interested, the record companies wanted the court to rule that they could ask for damages for every single infringement by every individual LimeWire user. Judge Wood rightly called the request for potemtially TRILLIONS of dollars ‘absurd’. Even without that, Limewire is still looking at being asked to pay anything from $7.5 million to $1.5 billion of “statutory” damages.

Full post as published by Information Overload on March 11, 2011 (boomark / email).