Talk:Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC

New article
I've added this page as an assignment for Brian Carver's WikiProject: Cyberlaw at UC Berkeley's School of Information. Appreciate feedback for how it can be improved. --Carothuf (talk) 03:08, 9 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks; you did great work. I wish all court case articles were so clear and concise. I hope you got a good grade in the class.
 * Unfortunately, in my quest to add information about subsequent developments in the case, I made the article a whole lot less concise. It's also possible I didn't characterize the arguments of the parties and the holdings of the court completely accurately, so please review and make changes as needed. Thanks. —mjb (talk) 18:43, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

"Press misreporting"
There is a problem here and I think it mostly concerns User:Mjb. There has been a conflation of two things. On one hand there was press misreporting that the injunction was still ongoing. On the other hand there is this concern over the 72 trillion dollar figure. People posting links to /r/todayilearned have been getting flagged and I think it is due to the wording in this article. This isn't just a reddit problem. The LimeWire article is out of sync with this one and mentions the 72 trillion dollar figure too.

I believe this article has problems with all three of the core content policies WP:NPOV, V and OR. Citing a source and then explaining why that is wrong isn't what is supposed to be done here. "Wikipedia's content is determined by previously published information rather than by the personal beliefs or experiences of its editors." If you want to say that a source is incorrect you need another source to say that. Saying that a source "inexplicably" said one thing, that something was "touted", or labeling it under "press misreporting" goes against this.

This article also hints at but doesn't explain the difference between the two numbers. The 75 trillion dollar number wasn't just taken from the defendant's pleadings. The 72 trillion dollar number is the "per-direct-infringement" number and it is calculated by multiplying $150,000 times the number of times the songs were downloaded. The 1.5 billion number is the "per-infringed-work" number and is calculated by multiplying $150,000 by the number unique of songs that were downloaded. The latter number was used when the Judge said that the former number was absurd. Some distinction needs to be made to show the amounts are being talked about in the form of (cost per infringement)*(number of infringements). Both numbers are highly variable and so you get a big variance in the actual number quoted. At least that's my take thus far. Gamerman2360 (talk) 00:37, 26 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm glad someone has taken more than a passing interest in the article and I hope we can figure out a way to make it better.
 * Re: the Press Misreporting section heading... Given the topic at hand—reviving and reacting to incorrect or misleading info that was resolved long ago—it seems ironic that you would complain now about a heading that I wrote two years ago and which only existed for 10 days before I deliberately made it more neutral. (It's just Press.) You also mixed up the numbers 72 and 75, much like the press did. That's a $3 trillion error. :)
 * Re: inexplicable, the op-ed that triggered the mid-2012 resurgence of the story gives no indication of why the 14-month-old news was suddenly being reported just then. That's what's "inexplicable"—simply meaning "with no reason given." I don't think that's inaccurate or particularly charged language, but we can change it to something more wordy if you want.
 * Re: touted, the author of the 2011 Corporate Counsel piece was the first in the press to say "$75 trillion" and was the first reliable source to say that the RIAA was actually seeking that much (his is the article the others cited that year). In that sense, he was "advancing" or "proposing" it as the maximum possible award; I chose "touted" as a synonym. I didn't intend to imply he came up with it himself and sought to promote it, or that it might be wrong. We can change it.
 * I'm not entirely comfortable making a statement to the effect of "the $75 trillion comes from this specific calculation" without a source to back it up. I actually asked the Corporate Counsel columnist about it to be sure that he didn't come up with it himself, and he said he absolutely got the number from the defendant's pleadings. So that's why in the article I added a statement to that effect, but I had to leave it with a citation-needed tag because I couldn't find it in the portion of the docket that's downloadable on Justia. It's possible I just missed it.
 * As for Reddit, I'm not responsible for what people post or why their content gets flagged, but it seems you're saying those posts shouldn't get flagged at all when they make it sound like the RIAA is still seeking $multi-trillion damages. Or maybe that the press section here is making it get flagged for the wrong reasons. I don't really understand.
 * Whether this article should even broach the topic of press coverage without citing sources that talk about said coverage, I don't know; that seems extreme. Plenty of precedent exists for summarizing press coverage throughout Wikipedia. And primary sources are fine for statements we make about what they say; i.e., we are saying outright that "source X said Y about this topic" and using the source as a reference for the fact that they said it. Further, we've already got the quite-reliable sources stating "not-Y" (i.e., that the RIAA isn't seeking and can't get those damages) so it should not be a problem to characterize the big flurries of press coverage declaring "Y" (especially when they make citations back to the "not-Y" sources) as being erroneous and not fact-checked. Is that really violating WP:NOR? How would you address it? —mjb (talk) 10:24, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I brought back the older heading to illustrate my point that this article seems a little more jaundiced then it should be, that the influences from older versions of the section are still there. I guess I don't really want to complain that the section is saying that certain news reports are wrong. I just mean that a) it's not written how I usually see things written here, with the source mirroring what is said in the wiki, but I guess I just haven't seen enough of the wiki. And b) I don't like words like "touted" because they seem to color the article in the same way that "press misreporting" did before.
 * The reddit posts are past tense. I don't think the posters are trying to imply that there is an ongoing legal action or that there was ongoing legal action when it was reported a year after it had been dismissed. Again I think the mystery-dollar-figure and the reporting-after-resolved issues are being conflated unnecessarily.
 * My point is that if they get flagged it should be because there is a section here that says there was never a 70 trillion dollar lawsuit, not because there is a section here that says attention-grabbing estimated figures were rereported incorrectly and at the wrong time.
 * Every time I type the number I don't know which to type. I don't think it matters very much though. I think what matters is whether you can say that someone suing for x number of copyright infringements is suing for x*150k. Someone who made a comment on reddit suggested it is a bad idea to think that every song download was 150,000 dollars. It made me really want to find out what people mean when they say that someone sued for x amount. The way you put it, it seems like if they plaintiffs don't ask for a specific amount then nothing can be said about how large or small the number is. Is this true? The judge seemed to think that the amount first being sought was "absurd." It might have been that she just thought that "per-direct-infringement" was absurd, but I don't understand why. The amount per infringement could have been very low. Why did she think it was absurd. "'If Plaintiffs were able to pursue a statutory damage theory based on the number of direct infringers per work, Defendants’ damages could reach into the trillions.'" "'more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877'"She seemed to think it was a gigantic number. It confuses me so.
 * I don't really want to respond to everything right now. I do want to ask two questions though. 1) Wouldn't "Press reporting" be a better title? 2) ref 29 seems to be an article from 2011 instead of 2012. Did something wrong happen here? Am I missing something? Did the dates change? Maybe the explicable reason for these articles is computer failure.. heh.. Gamerman2360 (talk) 14:38, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Sorry for the delay. I was busy, and also wanted some time away from the article so I could look at it with fresh eyes. I went ahead and made some edits today to tone it down a bit, removing inexplicably and touted.

Re: "Press reporting" as a section title: I'll go along with it, but it seems redundant. I intended "press" as short for "press coverage," as in "what kind of press did this case get?" *shrug*

Re: ref 29 (the Computerworld article), we do say it's from 2011, and that we cited/accessed it in 2012. Including the access date is customary when citing an online source, because the sources can change or go offline without notice.

Re: "The way you put it, it seems like if they plaintiffs don't ask for a specific amount then nothing can be said about how large or small the number is. Is this true?"... Sort of. We just have to be very careful to attribute whatever numbers we quote to whoever said them. The RIAA insists they didn't say a specific number, and that seems to be technically true. So even though many press outlets said "the RIAA asked for $X", the RIAA's denial means we can't just say "the RIAA asked for $X" but rather we have to say there's a conflict between what different sources say the RIAA asked for, and this in turn requires us to vet the sources more than normal. As it turns out, nearly all of the reports were just echoing each other and appear to ultimately derive from the 2011 Law.com article. It also appears that while the RIAA really didn't ask for a specific amount in writing, in docket document no. 540 (ref #25) they do essentially (but still not quite in so many words) say how they expect the court to make the calculation. The defendants went ahead and did the calculation, mentioning the specific numbers in another document in the docket, a document still locked behind PACER's paywall. Victor Li says the latter document was the source of the numbers in the Law.com article. Once we have the doc, I'll gladly cite it, but I'm not sure it would really change anything.

Re: what numbers you (or Reddit) should use, well, it depends on what you want to say, and how comfortable you are with doing the calculations yourself. When filing the lawsuit in 2006, the RIAA sought the statutory maximum of $30K or $150K per work in damages from LimeWire and its owners for roughly 11,000 different songs downloaded by LimeWire users. Doing the calculation yourself, you could say that the RIAA implicitly sought roughly $330 million–$1.65 billion, although the actual outcome could be as low as the minimum ($750 per work), so the possible range, if they prevailed, would be $8.25 million–$1.65 billion. Then, in mid-2010, after LimeWire was found liable for infringement by its users, the RIAA demanded that damages be calculated per infringement by each user, and they estimated there were 500 million downloads of the works. Doing the calculation ourselves, that's $375 billion–$75 trillion. Victor Li suggests that LimeWire actually estimated the RIAA wanted at least $400 billion instead of $375 billion. Maybe this was an error in LimeWire's math. Regardless, the RIAA was forced to stop seeking per-infringement damages in March 2011, when the court ruled the possible result of "trillions" "absurd" and required that damages be calculated per work, resulting in a range of $7.5 million–$1.5 billion because the number of songs at issue for statutory damages dropped to about 10,000 by this point of the trial. The parties then settled out of court in May 2011, with one of LimeWire's owners paying out $105 million (there was probably more to the settlement than that, though). Not sure this helps :) —mjb (talk) 13:58, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment
This article is the subject of an educational assignment at University of California, Berkeley supported by WikiProject United States Public Policy and the Wikipedia Ambassador Program&#32;during the 2011 Spring term. Further details are available on the course page.

The above message was substituted from by PrimeBOT (talk) on 16:35, 2 January 2023 (UTC)