grelmar - 4:00 pm on Oct 5, 2007 (gmt 0)

Something needs to be done! Do the artists know about this? Are they the ones getting the money?

I doubt the artists are going to see a dime of this. My guess is that the money will go straight into the RIAA's investigative/legal/enforcement budget (but I don't know for sure).

Like a lot of people here, I'm a bit of a statistics fiend, and there are a few numbers I'd like to know.

Out of the thousands of songs this lady allegedly made available for sharing, how many of them did she rip from CD herself? How many were simply the result of her collecting songs from other sharers?

How many of the shared songs are in active distribution? At any given time, less than 10% of most label's library is currently in distribution. There's a huge amount of music out there that is currently "vaulted" - not available for purchase. I used to have difficulty believing that such a large % of music was out of circulation, then I started digitizing my wife's vynil collection. For anyone who's done this, you know it's a lot less effort to just go out and buy the CDs than go through all the hoops of recording, cutting, editing, and cleaning tracks off old vynil. Almost none of these old records were available, even though they reside in the collections of major labels.

What was the penalty based on? Was it a $ value per song? Or was it a lump sum "You been a baaaaaaad girl," amount?

As an aside, the timing of this is amusing, just days after Radiohead released numbers on the success of their "pay what you feel it's worth" [blog.wired.com] scheme for the download of their new album. On one side, you have a band abandoning the old model and labels for a listener orientated distribution scheme. On the other, you have a consortium of the big money labels lashing out against a "pirate" who likely never saw a dime in revenue from her activities.

Thoughts come to mind about winning battles and losing wars.