Arizona student’s pirate adventure
p2pnet.net News View:- The Big Music cartel is infamous for its creative writing and statistics, but one of its best efforts yet comes in the case involving the University of Arizona student whom the cartel’s RIAA accuses of pirating $50,000,000 – fifty million – dollars’ worth of music and movies.
“$50 million at $1 per 4 mb song = ~200 terabytes!,” says a p2pnet reader.
“I want this guy’s computer! And so does Google!”
But, the comment post goes on, “in the case of this person careful investigation will [probably] show he was actually selling bootleg products, not simply sharing files.”
Whether that prediction will pan out or not remains to be seen. In the meanwhile, “I love the extremely inflated $50 million figure though,” says the Reader’s Wsrite.
“How did they come up with that one? If you assume a retail value of 1$ for each song and 4 mb per song, then that comes out to roughly 200 terabytes, give or take a few gigs. You’d be able to buy yourself a luxury car for the cost of the hard disks alone and I doubt there’s a raid controller or motherboard capable of controlling that much data storage from a single machine or any but the most expensive industrial server.
“It’s even more space if you use movies which take up much more space per retail dollar, assuming full dvd value.
“It’s not particularly surprising that the FBI lies so blatantly. After all few people understand these dynamics. Those that do have too few a voice to be heard amidst the din of continual blatantly false criminal accusations..
“So now we have two technical fallacies about computers to go with legal fallacies of copyright.
“One is that bandwidth is somehow unlimited (I wish it were true) and ‘a single mouse click’ can somehow distribute to millions of people instantly.
“The other is apparently that people can right now economically build systems capable of storing hundreds of terabytes of data.
“Again, I wish both of these were true, then it would be impossible to actually detect and track the transfers, as they would be instantaneous, and one would be nearly guaranteed to have enough space never to need removable media storage again.
“In the words of Brian Wilson, ‘Oh wouldn’t it be nice’."
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March 8th, 2005 at 7:22 pm
I expect the RIAA is using the $150,000 figure that is the maximum statutory damages per violation. That is what they usually do when suing in civil court under they John/Jane Doe cases. 10 files= 1.5 million
That way it comes out to approx 333 violations, which make it seem much more feasible.