Comments on: Battle Over Limewire Damages Drags Google And MySpace Into The Fray http://paidcontent.org/2011/02/25/419-battle-over-limewire-damages-drags-google-and-myspace-into-the-fray/ The economics of digital content Fri, 13 Dec 2013 18:54:38 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: jdb http://paidcontent.org/2011/02/25/419-battle-over-limewire-damages-drags-google-and-myspace-into-the-fray/#comment-82686 Fri, 04 Mar 2011 19:34:39 +0000 http://paidcontent.wp.gostage.it/2011/02/25/419-battle-over-limewire-damages-drags-google-and-myspace-into-the-fray/#comment-82686 Apples and oranges – Google and Myspace made deals for streaming media, not the distribution of discrete copies of songs. Their deals are irrelevant.

]]> By: Joe Mullin http://paidcontent.org/2011/02/25/419-battle-over-limewire-damages-drags-google-and-myspace-into-the-fray/#comment-82685 Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:52:59 +0000 http://paidcontent.wp.gostage.it/2011/02/25/419-battle-over-limewire-damages-drags-google-and-myspace-into-the-fray/#comment-82685 Thanks for your comment. But your suggestion that copyright damages are based on what the copyright holder lost isn’t quite right. Copyright damages are statutory damages, they can be $150,000 per work willfully infringed even if the copyright owner lost nothing and wasn’t hurt at all. Damages can be much higher than what the copyright holder lost (if they lost anything — and the amount of real damage done by piracy is actually hard to prove.)

The point I was trying to make is that whatever the damage demands are, they’re far more than Limewire made. It’s just an explanation of why the labels are going after Mark Gorton and related entities.

When it comes to calculating damages in this case, I think the bottom line is that the judge is going to have a lot of flexibility to decide.

]]> By: Yournamehere http://paidcontent.org/2011/02/25/419-battle-over-limewire-damages-drags-google-and-myspace-into-the-fray/#comment-82684 Fri, 25 Feb 2011 10:42:16 +0000 http://paidcontent.wp.gostage.it/2011/02/25/419-battle-over-limewire-damages-drags-google-and-myspace-into-the-fray/#comment-82684 “The record labels have said in the past that their damage demands against Limewire could be hundreds of millions of dollars, or even top $1 billion. There’s no way Limewire ever made that kind of cash”

wait, what? Damages are not determined based on what the criminal made, but on how much the poor souls that were grifted lost. Tallying up the market value of all the songs ever pirated on Limewire would be not just a billion, but BILLIONS.

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