i was wondering how organizations (namely the MPAA and RIAA) get their $ when they sue people for $1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, give or take a couple of zeros.

I was reading a wiki entry on the differences between movie distributions (screeners, telesyncs/cines, etc) and found this story on a lawsuit involving piracy

basically, someone within the adacedy awards was smuggling screeners to some poor guy (Russell Sprague of Homewood, Illinois). they got caught and are now being sued.

quote:

The studios are suing in the United States District Court in Los Angeles, seeking damages of a minimum of $150,000 per movie, with hundreds of individual violations alleged.

so, say it's $150k per movie, and by hundreds, we'll choose 200.
so, 200* 150k
that's $30 million dollars!

now i wouldn't know how much people within the Academy Award company get paid, but this guy would have $30m in his bank account. As for the guy in illonois, he's a CHEF (he had a blog on blogger ). so i guess that guy can't really pay much.

so.....the case goes to court and the MPAA wins, where do they claim their check? do they just grab their bank accounts, put the guys in jail and sacrifice a baby for "TEAM GLORIOUS CASH."

gotta pay the lawyers!

(i doubt but..)does the government or copyright agency pay them for their copyright damages, sort of like property insurance?

what if Mr MPAA was walking downtown and noticed a homeless guy with a copy of 300 in his shopping cart. lawsuit?

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150k is the ceiling of legal entitlement stratified by severity of the offense. most of these lawsuits are message-driven and often settle out of court for much less based upon federal sentencing guidelines. a kid with 10,000 mp3s obviously can't pay the riaa a billion dollars in damages. it wouldn't reflect well on the industry if their lawyers tried to either...

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Last edited by R!CH on Mar-27-2007 at 01:02

The really large awards come into play with punitive damages. However, lawmakers are working on limiting punitive damages so that they do not exceed "actual" damages.