RIAA: LimeWire owes $75 trillion

The music industry thinks LimeWire should pay $75 trillion in damages for their copyright infringement claim. The judge in the case, Judge Kimba Wood, has called this request “absurd”.

The current US GDP is about 14 trillion, less than 1/5th the damages requested. In fact, the GDP of the entire world is somewhere between $59 and $62 trillion in US dollars. So the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is, to quote Judge Wood, “suggesting an award that is more money that the entire music recording industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877.”