RIAA will take 2191.78 years to sue everyone

[certified psycho]

READER MICHAELA STEPHENS says that if the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is right and that 60 million US folk are file sharing, it's going to take the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) a mighty long time to get round to them all.
She said: "I pulled out my calculator to see just how long it would take the RIAA to sue all 60 million P2P music file traders at a rate of 75 a day. 60,000,000/75 = 800,000 days to subpoena each person or 800,000 days/365 days in a year = 2191.78 years to subpoena each person..."

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10733

[ElectricFetus]

They did not count exponential growth and the fact that every day there are new file shares, to put it bluntly they could not sue as many as there are and will be file-sharing, in 20 years the number of people that they could sue for file-sharing will have increase by x10! This is more of a tactic on RIAA part to scare people into not sharing. The money would be indirect back to the artist: CD sales would go up… theoretically, I don’t think this will have any effect at all!

[Zero]

No, they will attempt shock and awe. Some people will get scared, and go offline, and the "big fish" will be subpeonad to death.

This would cause a severe dent in the P2P "database" of music, and that would be more than enough success for RIAA.

Of course, surely you're not naive enough to think that RIAA will be above planting spiders in P2P networks?

[Christian Sodomy]

Their job is not to sue everyone, but to sue enough hub and file sharing providers that people have fear.

Fear is the basis of most economies.

[420Joey]

I don't know about the basis, but partially agreed Sodomy.. the same can be applied to religion, right?... namely.. Christianity?

[Banshee]

Let's make some numbers:

- The actual rate of subpoenas issued by RIAA is 75 per day.
Only in USA there are around 65'000,000 of file sharing people.

- To reach 100% of the music downloaders they need 2,379.32 YEARS (376 years more than the time passed since Jesus was presumably born).

- That means 237.93 years for 10% and just 23.79 years to sue 1% of the USA people who download music from P2P's.

Let's check some possible facts:

USA Judicial System will need to hire 50 or 60 times more workers than they have today to deal with all this cases, and of course forget about less dangerous crimes like rape, murder, assault, terrorism, etc.

I don't know the costs of a trial in USA, but it's pretty expensive, so RIAA will need to increase the cost of Cd's at least 10 times to pay those costs.

I assume only 1% of the people sued wil pay the indemnizations and the rest will declare themselves bankrupt.

Of course USA economy will suffer more than in 1929 if millions of persons declare themselves bankrupt.

So, that's the way RIAA tries to sell more music, I'm sure they will succeed and sell millions of Cd's in a broken country.


( - with thanks to my Peruvian friend Ivan)