RIAA Bullshit Damages

The RIAA (Ridiculously Inflated Accounting Abberations) get US$150,000 as statutory damages for copyright infringement.

Donny, of Donny's Blog, has taken some data available from copyright apocalypse that is The Pirate Bay, and calculated just how much the RIAA is claiming entitlement to, for such shennanegans.

It turns out to be more than the GDP of France. France has the sixth highest GDP of any country in the world.

I think Donny's estimates are extremely conservative. He calculates the dollar amount based on the number of songs in a torrent, times the number of torrents. In actualité, each person seeding any of the torrents would be hit for that amount, per copyright violation. Assuming an average of 5 people seeding each torrent, the fines would come out at higher than the GDP of the world.

And, as Donny says, that's only for January!