About $2 per song would account for lost revenue due to Mr. Tenenbaums file sharing and the remaining $3 could serve as punitive damages.

Thus Mr. Tenenbaum would owe them $150. This would be very fair.

The thing that peeves me to no end is the outrageous settlements they are asking for which are unreasonable by any means of assessment. They are based on the premise that every download equals a lost sale. Truth is, that those who download would likely choose not to get a song at all if they had to pay for it. Many of them probably wouldn’t even be able to afford to get the song if they couldn’t download it for free.

If I would have to make a guess, it would be that less than one percent of every download equals a lost sale, and as such, downloading music is mostly a victimless crime.

The loss in sales of the major labels has more to do with the low quality over-produced, over-compressed (and normalized to 96% volume) generic garbage they have been putting out over the last 15 years that no one in their right mind would pay for. Personally I choose not to listen to it at all, but I can see why and how many would justify just downloading it.

So if we come, may we make a statement to the court? :p

Shortly after this conversation we began reading the news articles people were being sued by RIAA and the FBI. They were calling piracy a crime of stealing and calling these people thieves. The RIAA and the FBI on their websites encourage people to report piracy. The FBI Anti Piracy Warning says they investigate. At that time we reported the officer’s conversation as well as his name to the RIAA and the FBI. It was ignored. A few months ago we were still reading news article people still being sued. Three of these cases that stood out were Joel Tennenbaum, Jammie Thomas and Whitney Harper all having to pay outrageous monetary amounts. Now feeling ignoring the officer’s conversation was unfair we began reporting the conversation to the RIAA the FBI the PD and several other anti piracy organizations along with the officer’s name asking why this was not investigated. Again it continues to be ignored. If piracy is a crime as the FBI the RIAA and others proclaim why was this conversation ignored. Considering piracy is being called a crime and the thousands of people that have been sued shouldn’t this conversation be investigated to see where the THOUSAND SONGS this officer talks about came from, who the everybody is that is doing this police officer’s conversation be investigated to see where the THOUSAND SONGS he talks about came from, who the everybody is that is doing it, and if he or his daughters may have committed what they are calling a crime. Ignoring this conversation seems to be an injustice to all the people that have been sued as well as to us as a citizen reporting it and it being ignored. How can they sue some and ignore a high ranking police officer discussing downloading music in this way. I feel this is wrong and don’t understand how this is allowed.

As a supporter of the copyright holders, I’ll be there!