I live in Dayton Ohio. 2 of my 4 local TV stations just reported about several people from our area being sued for downloading music. One of these people was using Limewire. This person is being sued by the National Association of Recording Artists for 70,000 !! She has only used Limewire and has downloaded a little over 6,000 songs. Needless to say, she is devastated! The reporter said this is happening more and more everyday and that the Recording Artists are generally setteling out of court for 3 to 4 thousand dollars. Do any of us have that kind of money lying around. This woman thought she was "protected" from any type of legal action because she had paid 18 dollars to limewire for their "pro" version. Not so. Beware !

She had to be either naive or stupid.


Shark Chum

What do you mean...naive or stupid? This woman was doing nothing more than all of us do. She was searching for songs she enjoyed and then downloading them to her computer. You got a bettewr way?
Lucky Dawg

Yea mm sharing over 6,000 songs u must be dum of course your dum in way of the world.Way in the world would you whant to share that many any way.In no i would not because there is a chance that you or i will get busted.

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It IS a P2P sharing program.
If it weren't for her and people like her, you wouldn't be getting the songs you want to download.

Xcom46...nowhere in the original post does it say she was sharing these files... Isn't downloading 6,000 songs enough? I mean, at the going rate of 1 dollar a song, that's...wait a minute...I think I've got it...$6,000!

Just because she is no different than you (so you say) doesn't mean that she wasn't stupid! I bet she just feels unlucky (like you or I would feel if we got busted).

If you break the law, you may get busted! Maybe not right away, but if you do it long enough or excessively enough, you will eventually get caught!

It's a risk we take if we download copywrited material...we all need to ask ourselves "how much is this worth to me...is it worth the risk?"

Just something to think about: at my local library, I can check out commercial films for free. FILE-SHARING? Looks like it to me. I hope my library doesn't get sued!

Dano

well, sucks for her

I can’t believe anybody really thought paying eighteen dollars to Limewire bought any immunity from anything. Anyway, however naive she has been it still seems excessive to sue her for so much. We are in danger of getting royalty figures out of proportion, because of publicity of the huge figures the plaintiffs always seem to sue for: its only when a record or CD is first bought that royalties are normally paid, if you buy one second-hand you won’t find royalties being claimed or expected. The current price at auction for ‘ordinary’ LPs (ie non-collectable vinyl) is around one english pound (plus twenty four pence auctioneers commission) for one hundred LPs. If royalties account for twenty per cent of the price of a record, with twelve tracks to one LP the royalty per song would be one fifth of one twelfth of one hundredth of a pound. Put a copyright song from one of those LPs in the Limewire Shared File and someone downloads it then what does the copyright holder really lose?- it equates to sixty downloads for one English penny royalty. You might say that if they couldn’t download it free they would go out and buy it new - no they wouldn’t, not usually. But even if they did - I bought two CDs at the weekend, brand new, city High Street music shop, thirty four tracks total, price £1.97 each CD, so even brand new the royalty on them was only two pence per track, (though the author might have a safeguard of a minimum per track or per unit). I have no wish to deprive copyright holders of their just dues but don’t lets get actual lost royalty payments out of perspective.

Perhaps a songwriter or singer would append on this post the current royalty rates. In the USA a few years ago the ‘compulsory licence’ royalty rate was 7.1 cents per composition or 1.35 cents per minute of playing time, whichever was greater, per CD/record. On this figure and if as the poster above says tracks cost 99 cents on-line then the actual royalty in the USA is less than 10%. So although the lady is being sued for 70,000 dollars, even if every one of the six thousand songs she shared had been uploaded once the actual royalty figure lost has been 426 dollars (and that is presuming that every uploader would otherwise have bought the song).

In my opinion, the woman is just playing dumb.

Besides, I've been reading up on the RIAA a little...Wikipedia says that music sales went UP when Napster was active and music sales went DOWN when the RIAA started litigating.

I also read that the RIAA is suing some Russian website for something like 1.5 TRILLION dollars! They're claiming something in the are of $150,000 of damages per song! Too bad Russia is not accountable to the RIAA...a little out of their jurisdiction, I think.

People are settling out of court because they would rather pay $3,000 than risk a full judgment, even though most cases have been dismissed. The RIAA relies on scare tactics.

Would I be scared if someone was suing me for $70,000? You bet!

I've shared over 5000 files before .. I don't anymore because OSX's Java can't handle it. And I've seen others share up to 15+ k files or something.

I agree that the lady definitely has room to appeal against such a fine. It's an exagerated fine. They do this for propoganda reasons to show to the media to try to scare people. But they won't report court appeals that knock the fines back to a small $ % of the original fine.