$80,000 per song
I'm a proponent of intellectual property rights (an oft-debated issue in libertarian circles), but copyright law in this country has just gone totally off the deep end. I blame Mickey Mouse. The desire to ensure that no one other than Disney can ever create anything related to Mickey Mouse apparently means that copyright protections will grow into perpetuity.
The RIAA is also responsible for our legal system going to insane extremes protecting copyrights, and they've won another astonishing verdict in one of their lawsuits against consumers:
A court has ruled that Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year-old mother of four, must pay $1.92 million in damages to record companies for illegally downloading 24 tracks off of file-sharing services like Kazaa. This amounts to $80,000 per song. This is one of the last few lawsuits in the courts pertaining to illegal downloads, as the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has said they will discontinue the suits in favor of working with ISPs to stop illegal downloads.
Yeah, they've decided all those shysters whose shoes cost more than your computer are getting too expensive. So instead they're going after whatever little shreds of privacy you have left.
