The RIAA enjoys a festive joke

It must be having a bit of a giggle, because if the RIAA claim against Allofmp3 is serious, it would just be making itself a laughing stock.

Hitherto, the RIAA has attempted hamfisted justification of claiming thousands per song from uploaders on the basis that they might have uploaded each song once, but those songs could have been downloaded repeatedly, costing the industry more than one sale.

Now, though, they're demanding $150,000 USD for each of the 11 million songs sold by allofmp3, despite two major problems with this:

First, even if we accept that a single download represents a single lost sale of a legitimate download (and we can stretch our credulity just that far this once), how does a loss of a 79 cent download suddenly morph into USD150,000 worth of loss?

We look forward to the RIAA bringing forth a witness who says, under oath, that had they not bought an allofmp3 download of Livin On A Prayer, they would have bought the same track 189,874 times off iTunes.

Secondly, not all of Allofmp3's customers live in the US. Why should Allofmp3 recompense an American label for the loss of a "potential download" (or two hundred thousand of them) when overseas customers wouldn't have been able to buy legitimate downloads from an RIAA company anyway?

And that's before you even get to the question of how a New York court is supposed to be the place to bring a legal action relating to Russian copyright law.

Since the RIAA isn't run by a bunch of idiots, and wouldn't set out to waste court time with vexatious litigation, we can only assume that, yes, this is all a little joke.

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