Around four years ago, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a lawsuit against LimeWire. The RIAA was suing on behalf of several music labels. In short, the RIAA claimed that LimeWire’s P2P software, which allowed people to download and distribute copyrighted songs for free, caused the music industry to lose millions of dollars. The RIAA won that case. All that was left was to figure out how much LimeWire now owed the RIAA as a result.

The RIAA came up with a figure that most people would find to be astounding. They want LimeWire to pay them $72 trillion. The RIAA feels that since LimeWire allowed thousands, (or maybe millions), of people to illegally download one, or more than one, of the 11,000 songs that the RIAA owns that it means the members of the RIAA are now entitled to statutory damages for every single illegal download that occurred.

Judge Kimba Wood has called that figure “absurd”. Judge Wood went on to say, in a recent decision:

“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.”

It is also worth noting that the estimated wealth of the entire world is around $60 trillion. I’m not sure why the RIAA thought that LimeWire would be able to somehow come up with more money than what all of the people in the entire world, all together, are estimated to have. To me, this sounds impossible.

Instead, it appears that LimeWire is facing statutory fines of up to $150,000 for each violation of copyright that they allowed to occur. That could mean that LimeWire may end up owing the RIAA around $1 billion dollars. How LimeWire would manage to pay that much money in damages is unknown.