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RIAA sues (some Russian MP3 site) for 1 TRILLION DOLLARS (seriously)
http://www.redherring.com/Article.a...+Site+for+%241B
| quote: | Music Sues Russian Site for $1T
************* is hit with a massive lawsuit but site says it’s protected by Russian law.
December 21, 2006
By Cassimir Medford
The music industry filed a stunning trillion-dollar lawsuit against a very popular Russian web site that has so far flaunted its legal status behind what the industry considers dubious justifications based on Russian law.
The Recording Industry Association of America, the legal arm of the United States music industry, on Wednesday filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York seeking more than one and a half trillion dollars in damages from *************.
The U.S. Department of Commerce recently called the Russian web site the world’s highest-volume online seller of pirated music. The web site claims five and a half million subscribers and a growth rate of 5,000 subscribers per day.
The RIAA claims that in a five-month period from June through October, U.S. customers downloaded 11 million songs from *************.
The Commerce Department has been all over the Russian government on *************, threatening to block Russia from membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) if it continues to protect *************.
The 149-member WTO is an international organization that sets the rules for global trade and adjudicates trade disputes between nations.
Interestingly, in a recent dispute with the tiny island nation of Antigua, the WTO ruled in favor of Antigua in an online gambling case. The U.S. has so far ignored the ruling.
Russian Air Cover
The problem for the RIAA is that a lawsuit filed against *************’s owner, Mediaservices, will have little success in forcing the Russian company to respect U.S. copyright law.
“The RIAA has been trying to close ************* for a couple of years from within the Russian legal system with little success,” said Michael Goodman, an analyst with Yankee Group.
“Russian law has provided ************* with sufficient cover to remain in business,” he added. “Suing them in the U.S. will do very little. It does not mean a solitary thing.”
The RIAA may be better off working with the U.S. government to apply pressure on the Russian government to shut down the music site, he said.
Hidden Stash
The geopolitics and economics of the Internet have placed the music industry in a peculiar position. While it continues to go after Americans with its legal club, it is almost powerless against non-U.S. organizations such as *************.
Earlier this year, MasterCard and Visa terminated their relationships with the web site, making it more difficult for the site’s subscribers to pay for their downloads, but the site continues to operate.
On the day after the RIAA filed its lawsuit, ************* added 24 new albums to its inventory of more than 600,000 songs. Among the new albums was Hidden Stash III by the Kottonmouth Kings, a hip-hop group from Placentia, California.
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The CIA World Factbook places the 2005 GDP of Russia at $740.7 billion. The RIAA thinks that they are owed the entire economic output of Russia for the next 16 months. I think their random number generator broke this time.
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