The legal case between LimeWire and the RIAA has been going on for some time now, but it wasn't until recently that the RIAA really put a figure on the amount of damages they think they're owed by the now-defunct filesharing service—and it's a doozy.


According to documents recently filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the RIAA was asking for damages of about $72 trillion dollars, a figure that the judge in the case said is "absurd." Judge Kimba Wood wrote in a recent decision that, "An award based on the RIAA calculations would amount to 'more money than the entire music industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877.'"

The estimated wealth of the entire world is about $60 trillion, meaning that the RIAA should have known how outlandish its claims were to begin with. Still, with statuatory fines still coming of about $150,000 per infraction, of which there were 11,000, LimeWire could still end up owing about $1 billion. [via NME, ComputerWorld]


Updated: Apparently both the NME and ComputerWorld stories we cited yesterday were, in fact, inaccurate. According to Liz Kennedy, the Director Of Communications for the RIAA, the case between LimeWire and the RIAA was "already settled for $105 million last year." We regret the mistake.