Question regarding lawsuits, monetary damages, and the RIAA

I'm not a lawyer so I'm not 100% on the legalities but the question is a valid one I think

Ok, so the RIAA is obviously on it's little rampage and I was reading one story in regards to it and as a side note they said that file sharing has caused an approximate 700 million dollar loss to the record companies.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/09/03/cd.future/index.html

That's the story that says on the right hand side that it's 700 million

I saw this and said fine... but then I saw this little story

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/06/27/music.sharing.column/index.html

Now first off, how can they seek billions of dollars from each person of the 1300 they have subpeona'd?? We're looking at trillions of dollars in that equation.

Now most of these cases are settled for 10-15k so it's obviously not as much as it potentially seeks.

Billions of dollars in damages though, I see no way they can even ask for that much in this situation. If the total approximation of CD sales loss is 700 million dollars then the most each of those 1300 people would pay (assuming it's split evenly) is approx $540,000 to make up for the loss on that. The RIAA doesn't give a rats a*s about the music shop that closed or anything like that, so it's not like they care about the people's lives who have been turned upside down by it, therefore there's no possibility of punitive damages.

Are these scare tactics? "Well we'll seek billions of dollars in damages and they'll think the court will actually back that up so we'll make them settle for less".

So final question and point of this post.

Can the RIAA actually ask for billions (trillions after you add up all of the lawsuits) of dollars in damages from people when their total losses were only 700 million?

i am sure there is a way.


think actual damages and punitive damages.

the question i have is this: they seem to be after the folks passing files along, not the leachers.

If you just leach and dont share, are they interested in you?

If you read the second article carefully, that kid was running a site that he made with a search engine for mp3s. He's being sued for copyright infractions orginating at his site. Potentially that could be a maximum amount of several billion dollars, if you figure he could owe $250000 per infraction (per federal law it's a penalty incurred, but they don't actually get the penalty money). They do, however, get the right to money for losses of business, fees for lawyers, investigations, etc. He ended up with a settlement of $15000 and taking down his search engine for the whole ordeal. Obviously, they threaten you with lawsuits but this guy was more valuable to them because he created his own file service/assistance. They RIAA may sue 1000 or more people, but in each case they will never get the 250000 per infraction so they'll toss you a settlement of somewhere between 5000 and 100000 depending on how much money you have and how badly you're found to break their copyrights.