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March 24, 2004
Slashdot Calculates RIAA Lawsuit Layaway Plan
Posted by Jason Schultz
A commenter over at Slashdot has calculated, given the current odds of being sued by the RIAA for file-sharing, how much you would need to save every month to pay off your eventual settlement.
The magic number? $0.01483 per month. Even assuming the RIAA stops settling and gets $1,000,000.00 judgments against every defendant, the number only goes up to about $5.00 per month.*
* Gee, haven't we heard that amount mentioned somewhere else recently?
Here's the text:
Given your numbers an illegal file sharer can calculate their monthly financial risk from RIAA lawsuits.
Your numbers are:
Time (T)=8 months
Probability (P)=1/25290
Cost (C)=3000
With monthly financial risk = (P*C)/T, if each month you put away 1.483 cents, you would on average have enough money to pay your settlement fees by the time you were sued.
Now assume that the RIAA gets more aggressive and settles less, and through the courts gets a $1 million verdict in 100% of the people it sues (1977 people / 8 months). The monthly financial risk then is $4.94 a month.
Comments (1)
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1. Cypherpunk on March 25, 2004 1:12 PM writes...
The problem is that people tend to be risk averse and so they don't like to face even low probability catastrophic events, hence the use of insurance. But I'm not sure you could insure against this risk, because the action is unlawful under the NET act. Of course the actions are actuall civil suits. Has anyone gotten their homeowner's policy or some other insurance to pay out for a settlement in one of these cases?
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