FileShareFreak [mirror]: RIAA Trivia Fun Facts!

February 15, 2008 by sharky

Unless you were recently found frozen in the arctic tundra and scientists managed to miraculously thaw you out, you’re probably already aware of the legal pressures the RIAA has been putting on file sharers. So instead of yackin’ our fool heads off about lawsuits & litigation, we thought it’d be more fun to share some interesting facts & stats that aren’t so well known. So test your trivia knowledge with these factoids - who knows, maybe they’ll come in handy if they ever put out a Trivial Pursuit “RIAA” Edition! (proceeds from sales not going to artists anytime soon).

— The RIAA represents hundreds of recording labels, of which the big 4 (Warner, Song BMG, Vivendi Universal and EMI) holds the rights to over 85% of all the music.

— The first “wave” of lawsuits began in 2003 against 261 U.S. file sharers. By January 20th, 2004, the number of active or settled cases reached almost 1,500. Of these, 333 had already been settled for an average judgment of $3,000 for each case.

— Up until March 24, 2004, you had a 1 in 25,290 chance of being sued by the RIAA if you lived in the U.S (and you actively shared music). Keep rolling those dice, Limewire users! Read on; this dramatically increases…

— By February 23, 2007, it had been estimated that 60 million Americans (1 in 5) actively share music files or did so in the past. By this time there had been roughly 20,000 litigations (active or settled) which leads to a 1 in 3,000 chance of being on the sued list. We believe that 60 million is quite high (c’mon, that’s almost everyone who has a computer) - a more conservative figure such as 20 million (overall) users would increase your chances of getting sued to 1 in 1,000. And it gets worse…

— By July 2007, there were over 21,000 active or settled lawsuits, and it has been suggested here that the number is up to 30,000 as of October, 2007. The latest statistics from the RIAA suggest that there were over 7.8 million households in March 2007 (in the U.S.) that illegally downloaded music. If these numbers hold steady, the odds of litigation for illegal music traffickers increases to 1 in 260. And if you ’share’ more than 500 music files, your chances begin to get into REAL dice-rolling numbers. Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?!

— If you’re one of the unlucky group who had the dice rolled against you, you can help out the RIAA in their case against you by admitting your guilt and settling online at their website. Simply enter the code from the pre-lawsuit letter and you can pay right there on the site! Very courteous of them! The RIAA really appreciates this; it saves them litigation fees and further pursuance of you; plus it means they 100% cannot lose their case - you just sealed the deal for them. (That was sarcasm, if you didn’t get it, troglodyte). This “Pre-Doe” option will supposedly allow settlements at a reduced amount, with a discount of $1000 or more, if settled before a John Doe lawsuit is brought to trial:

https://www.p2plawsuits.com/P2P_00_Home.aspx

— There’s a $2 surcharge on CD burners that goes to the RIAA. They also collect a 2% levy on blank CDs.

— IFPI (the group that the RIAA is under) estimates the trade of pirated music CDs was worth USD $4.5 billion globally in 2005. At the same time, almost 20 billion tracks were illegally swapped or downloaded on the Internet in 2005. However, it only makes it to number 22 on the list of contraband value as ranked by www.havocscope.com. Software piracy and movie piracy both ranked higher at #8 and #12, respectively. And to get offtopic, marijuana is ranked #1.

— The average awarded compensatory damage (in court) for each shared song is $750, but this can get as high as $9,250 in extreme cases. The average monetary value of a song on a CD is 70 cents. That’s quite a price markup!

— It is FAR BETTER to settle out of court, although this means you cannot possibly win your case. The ‘average’ out-of-court settlement is a mere $116.67 for each song, while upon conviction, you’ll pay at least $750 per track, possibly more. That’s more than one-sixth less if you settle before brought to trial. Then again, if your case is dismissed you’ll pay nothing. Countless people have refused a $3,000 or $3,500 settlement only to wind up having to pay more than $22,000.

— In 2005, an RIAA spokesperson claimed that 1,700 out of 8,400 people has ’settled’ their case without court proceedings in the first 3 years up to that date. This leads to a 20 % success rate without even going to trial. If the current statistics are correct in assuming there have been 30,000 subpoenas with each being an average of $3,000 - this means that perhaps 6,000 ’songlifters’ have gone this route. The total dollars for the RIAA in pre-lawsuit settlements alone could be as high as $18 million - although this is probably overblown.

— Up until and including 2005, the RIAA was only launching lawsuits and ‘pre-lawsuit’ letters against people who were sharing more than 500 files. Anything less than the 500 threshold and it was highly likely you’d be overlooked. It’s unclear what their current status is on this.

— Statistically, older people are more inclined to fight the cases against them and drag them to trial. Younger people will either settle out-of-court, or they’ll ignore the ‘pre-lawsuit’ letters and hope the whole thing just blows over (in which it does in most cases). With this elevated success-rate for pre-trial settlements among the younger generation, the RIAA has now focused their strategy upon campuses and universities. With an incurred cost of just $200 per settled case, they stand to make a profit of $2,800 on average - whereby they likely make nothing from the cases that go to trial. And we all know how money-hungry they are - it doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out which avenue they’d rather you go down. The tactic is simple: “Settle with us now, or we both end up paying more later!”.

— Your untimely death will not exonerate you. They’ll still go unheeded against whoever you live with or your next-of-kin, as in the case of Larry Scantlebury. After a 60-day grieving period, RIAA then aimed their crosshairs on his children, and the case pushed forward with depositions against them, instead.

— Only 20% of music recorded by artists represented by music companies under the RIAA umbrella actually makes it to a retail level. The other 80% gets locked away in a vault, never to be heard again, depriving artists of revenue for music they’ve already recorded. And every year, the RIAA releases even fewer artists into the fold; instead opting to promote and support the existing popular artists, in hopes to increase sales of a known product.

— The youngest person (that we know of) involved in an RIAA lawsuit is 10 years old, having committed the alleged crime at the tender age of 7. The oldest was an 80-year old grandmother who apparently had never even used a computer before. In another case in which they withdrew from, 83-year old Gertrude Walton was served official court papers. Did the RIAA withdraw from the lawsuit because of her age? Nope. It’s because she died in December, 2004. And surprisingly (believe it or not), they didn’t feel compelled to pursue her middle-aged daughter who lived with her at the time. And you thought they were heartless!

— The largest judgment ever awarded to the RIAA in litigation is $222,000 USD against Jammie Thomas in October, 2007. She shared over 1,700 songs but the RIAA focused on just 24 of them - that’s a whopping $9,250 for each one. Originally Thomas had turned down a settlement offered by the RIAA, probably in the low thousands. One of the 24 tracks that she was ’sharing’ was Destiny’s Child’s Bills, Bills, Bills.

Not stolen - borrowed — If you still enjoy purchasing music (in stores or online) but you can’t stand the RIAA, here’s a website that allows for searching of non-RIAA artists. Purchase their music instead - the RIAA won’t see a dime of it:

http://www.riaaradar.com/

— And here is the actual letter that litigants are being asked to sign. (It’s the ’settlement agreement’ letter which specifies damages and admition of guilt).

RIAA CD Sales Chart

— In the dawn of the P2P file sharing era, sales of CDs in the U.S. slumped by 139 million albums between 2000 and 2002. Interestingly, they still managed to sell 803 million albums in 2002 alone - a drop of 15.3 percent from 2000.

Here’s the crunched numbers of CD album sales for each year. All figures are listed in millions. Statistics courtesy of the RIAA website. Click here to see a more detailed list of stats & figures.

Text user account page

The overall net change in shipped CDs from 2000 to 2006 is a decrease in 327.6 million CDs, or a negative percentage of -34.8%. Yikes, CD sales are down more than one-third since P2P file sharing took off in 2000.