RIAA sues 'pirate outfit' for $1.6 trillion

THE Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has said that it is suing a Russian online music outfit for $1.6 trillion.

Although it has been known that the RIAA intended to sue Mediaservices, which owns AllofMP3.com and allTunes.com, for illegally flogging copyrighted music, it was not clear how much or how the recording industry lobby group intended to do it.

Now, according to Zeropaid.com, it seems that the RIAA want $150,000 for each of the 11 million songs allegedly pirated.

No one knows how much cash the site has made, but it is certainly not in trillions of dollars. The other thing that the RIAA seems to be doing is taking its court action in New York and not in Russia where AllofMP3 operates.

As an AllofMP3 company spokesman pointed out, his company does not operate in New York so the suit is unjustified. The company obeys Russian copyright laws and even pays a chunk of its profits to the RIAA's equivalent in that country.

It pays the standard 15 per cent Russian licensing fee that applies to online music to ROM, the Russian Organisation for Multimedia.

But the RIAA denies the right of ROM to exist. This is mostly because the organisation has negotiated Internet deals that would weaken the RIAA's case if they were adopted globally. It also does not like the fact that ROM wants less cash from online music deals than the RIAA deems acceptable to itself.

So the question is, what is the RIAA up to in starting a court action it cannot possibly hope to win any cash from? The answer is 'spin'. The RIAA would get a default judgement where the legal issues and the compensation issues are taken at face value by a judge. The RIAA can lobby its mates in government claiming that these evil Russian pirates owe the American music industry a trillion and a half bucks.

Nothing focuses a US politicians' attention like a few thousand zeros and means that the question will be ironed out between heads of state, rather than by the RIAA. µ

L'INQ
Zeropaid