this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
156 points (98.8% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
54698 readers
433 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):
💰 Please help cover server costs.
Ko-fi | Liberapay |
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
PerogiBoi here probably has it right. I remember during the heyday of Piracy in the early 2000's strings of sites coming down, Comcast getting busted for illegally using Sandvine to throttle or even outright block bittorrent traffic, Limewire being sued for more money than existed in the entire monetary system of the planet at the time, and corruptly buying out the courts of a foreign country so we could put The Pirate Bay admins in prison.
When people start putting on their piracy hats, they bring out the big legal guns.
EDIT: I will literally never get over Limewire being sued for more money than existed. It proved, without a shadow of a doubt, in my mind, exactly how bullshit the fines for individual copyright violations are. If piracy resulted in more money than exists... you can't prove to me that that is a lost sale. Because there literally was never enough money to have afforded the purchases to begin with.
Huh, TIL.
Regarding your edit, that amount wasn't the cumulated cost of whatever Limewire were distributing, that would be idiotic indeed; rather the RIAA tried to call for a ruling that somehow those guys were causing $150,000 in damages - per instance. Now the article unfortunately doesn't state how they possibly tried to justify that number, and I can't be bothered to research that myself. Another thing that would interest me is how the plaintiff expected them to pay with almost every dollar on Earth.
So while I don't think this had anything to do with "lost sales", I do agree with the possible fines and damage calculations not being fit for any sort of realistic purpose at all.
If i remember correctly the justification was pretty much "trust me, bro".