RIAA sues ALLofMP3.com for US$1.65 trillion, says: "Go Big or Go Home!"

TechCrunch.com: AllOfMP3 Responds To RIAA’s $1.65 Trillion Lawsuit, reported on by LongorShortCapital.com.

The RIAA, having decided that suing dead people and little girls isn't ludicrous enough, have opted to go for broke: history's largest civil damages claim, filed in the USA, against a company with no US presence, which is obeying all the laws of the nation in which they operate.

Got that?

Long or Short Capital's analysis of the claim lays bare its fundamental worth:

If AllOfMP3.com has destroyed $1.65 trillion of value or committed acts worth $1.65 trillion in punishment, there is implicit in that the idea that the RIAA stakeholders are worth a minimum of $1.65 trillion plus whatever fair market values would peg them at. A quick perusal of the enteprise values of the constituents of the RIAA make it clear that they are not worth even $100bn, much less 16x that.
Also implicit in the $1.65 trillion number is that AllOfMP3.com has sold somewhere close to $1.65 trillion worth of music in its 3-4 years of mainstream existence. In 2004, there was $30-40bn of total music recording sales (and the RIAA does not represent all of that figure). The GDP of Russia is about $1.5 trillion. In 2005 there were $1.1bn of digital music sales. So in 3-4 years, AllOfMP3.com did the damage worth the revenue equivalent of 40-55 years of total music recording sales or 1x the GDP of Russia.

There's really nothing else to add here. No one, not even Dave Barry could make this up. If the trend of surreal news stories continues to prevail, it bodes ill for media outlets such as The Onion, since satire and reality have become indistinguishable.

Sphere: Related Content