Clues for the Clueless
Today must be the day for piles of stupid. I see that the RIAA expects Limewire to cough up - wait for it - $1.5T $150B
Now it looks as though one Kelly M. Klaus (right) of Munger, Tolles & Olson, yet another RIAA posse, wants Wood to order LimeWire owner Mark Gorton to pay $1,500,000,000,000 [ed: $150B] for 200,000,000 alleged downloads, at $750 per.
Where does a dumb figure like $750 per song come from? never mind the obvious - most trading of music doesn't cost anyone money, because the people engaged in large amounts of file sharing weren't going to pay under any circumstances. The rest (the vast majority) who grab a handful of songs probably end up buying more after figuring out whether they like an artist or not.
But never mind all that - the going price for songs on the net ranges from $0.79 - $1.29. Where the heck does $750 come from? I'm afraid it comes from somewhere the sun never shines...
Comments
Re: Clues for the Clueless
[anonymous] June 9, 2010 10:14:41.373
An extra zero crept in there: 200,000,000 times $750 is $150,000,000,000, or $150 billion. Which is somehow just as laughable as $1.5 trillion, despite being 90% smaller.
Incidentally, after the bailout and stimulus, I'd like to pass a law that bans newspapers from using "billion" and "trillion", in favor of "thousand million" and "million million" — not because I'm British, but because the man on the street really doesn't grasp the enormity of a trillion the way he would a million frickin' million.
While I'm passing laws, expressing large sums of money on a per-capita basis should be mandated, too. The RIAA's demand equals $500 for every man, woman, and child in the United States.