The music industry wants LimeWire to pay up to US$75 trillion in damages after losing a copyright infringement claim. That's right . . . $75 trillion. Manhattan federal Judge Kimba Wood has labeled this request "absurd."
A federal jury this week ordered Minnesota native Jammie Thomas-Rasset to pay $1.5 million to six music companies for pirating 24 of their copyrighted songs. The decision came in the third trial on the same issue.
File-sharing program LimeWire has been permanently shut down after a federal judge found it guilty of assisting users in committing copyright infringement "on a massive scale."
Even after cutting a damages award in a file-sharing case to one-tenth the original sum, a judge said Friday the new fine was still excessive.