What kind of harm? Massive layoffs, of course. But also less money to invest in artists. That means fewer artists on our rosters, fewer people who can make a living from music, fewer songs permeating through our culture that help form a piece of our national identity.

These voluntary programs are not a panacea. No program ever will be. And sometimes, the Congress must step in to assure that our property rights, and U.S. economic interests, are being protected. Especially against sites overseas whose business model is the theft of U.S. works.

We hope other intermediaries like search engines will follow suit in negotiating voluntary marketplace best practices to prevent directing users to sites that are dedicated to violating property rights.

"Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877," Wood wrote, citing a Lime Group court filing referring to the inventor Thomas Edison. She called this an "absurd result."

Explanatory Notes

First and foremost, the legal war chest must be refilled. It never sleeps and it is always hungry. Copyright won't protect itself and every battle to secure these rights has become long, uphill and against the wind.

A $15 billion payout doesn't come around every day and our executives are justly entitled to a large chunk of that ($3.15 bil.). As an added bonus (to the bonuses), all executives will be treated to a celebratory blimp ride ($2.25 bil.). This dollar amount seems high until you consider that each executive will be requiring their own blimp. Previously, the executives had shared one blimp, but in the post-Napster environment, "sharing" is obviously no longer a legal option.

Other line items include the ongoing efforts in Washington to impose the RIAA's will on the internet, research and development and the opaquely-named "Other Expenditures."

(1) Other Expenditures
Having run the "Stealing a Song = Stealing a Car" analogy into the ground, we need a new "go to" catchphrase. Hence, $1.05 billion should be earmarked for development of a new anti-piracy metaphor. Suggestions include:

• Stealing a song is like stealing a yacht.
• You wouldn't steal popcorn, would you?
• There's no such thing as a free lunch, free song or an infinite good.
• File sharing is as un-American as immigration, outsourcing and opium production.
• You wouldn't steal a blimp, would you?
• Stealing a song is like kidnapping an artist's children and is punishable by a sentence of 25 years to life.

Other incidental expenditures include a much-needed re-upholstering of the executive suites and a celebratory hot tub full of money to splash around in with various members of the escort community, each of whom will be paid in full for their services, including any fees due for public performance.

(2) Research and Development
A lion's share of the payout will go towards the ongoing development of a time machine/wormhole to 1991 ($450 million). Many recent efforts have come close but the RIAA has yet to reach the pre-Napster days and develop a parallel timeline in which CD sales increase forever. On the plus side, it did manage to get our mom to hook up with our dad, thus ensuring our continued existence.

Other products/services on the way:

• A computer-unfriendly music delivery system, much needed in this time of digital theft. Wax cylinders have been discussed as well as a partnership with RealPlayer, whose clumsy, bug-ridden software would likely prevent music from being enjoyed on a wide variety of operating systems.
• "Lost Sales" calculation improvements, which should allow the RIAA to seek even larger damages from various file sharing services. It is hoped that we will finally reach the trillion dollar mark within the next decade. In addition, breakthroughs should also be sought in the "Shocking Graph" field, what with the recent success of the "Napster Ruined Everything" line graphs.
• A partnership with the developers of The Club to prevent music from being stolen. A possible route would be some sort of clamp that could be tightened around an ethernet cable to prevent uploading. In other words, not so much "throttling" as "strangling."
• Domain seizure technology, via the RIAA's partnership with ICE, which has already proven its ability to take thousands of sites offline despite lack of evidence or proper investigative techniques. On the front burner: cooperating with ICE's takedown of many large pharmaceutical companies who continue to make themselves rich off various anti-seizure remedies, including the weirdly-named Antivan and Dilantin.

Royalty Payments

Royalty disbursements, as expected, will be delivered in a "top down" fashion. Those artists with the most sales will receive a disproportionately large share of the proceeds. After the "Big 3" are taken care of (and a chunk of money thrown towards Paul McGuiness in hopes that some of it lands in his mouth), the remaining funds will be dispersed to yet more lawyers and an appreciable amount ($300,000 ) put towards the ongoing health of Jon Bon Jovi's remaining hair. It is hoped that he will be able to put off his eventual "Trump Hair" for another 7-10 years, thus ensuring his continued success in the field of "fairly attractive frontmen." See footnotes for royalty dispersals.

*Charting Artists

$300,000 will be divided evenly among those artists currently in the Top 40 at the point of dispersal. If said artist happen to include any of the "Big 3," well, I suppose the rest of you should just write better hits, right? There's no crying in the music industry, especially if you're unrecouped.

*Non-Charting Artists

The remainder of the RIAA's roster will split $150,000. To qualify for payment, bands/musicians must have a viable Wikipedia page (stubs and pages slated for deletion do not count) and a web presence that includes more than just a long-abandoned MySpace page. (Try Facebook.)

As you well know, the internet was invented in 1991 by billionaire tycoon, Al Gore. In its infancy, the internet was nothing more than a forum for conspiracy theorists to exchange anti-government writings and ASCII porn. However, everything changed in 1998 with the simultaneous debut of Napster and the mp3, both invented by Shawn Fanning. With this new "distribution system," the music industry could no longer afford to ignore the looming force of the internet, at least not for more than the next half-decade. Now, with billions at stake, the RIAA has unleashed its ultimate weapon: the line chart. Below is their devastating "Exhibit A:" filed in the lawsuit against Limewire:

Broken down bizarrely into "Albums per Capita," the RIAA's chart takes care to point out two things:

1. Napster.
2. All else being equal, record sales will grow indefinitely.

But that's not all. The number crunchers over at the RIAA have also entered the following charts as eye-catching evidence of the havoc wreaked by file sharing. 

Exhibit B: Napster vs. Kerosene Sales

Kerosene usage dropped off considerably before the 1990's, but was still growing slowly for most of the decade. As this previously unpublished RIAA chart clearly shows, 1999 (1 P.N.*) was kerosene's peak, which was then followed by a decade-long slide. Consulting economists from George Mason University have stated that Napster's arrival "didn't have a goddamn thing to do with kerosene's decline." This testimony has been stricken from the record as "irrelevant," as no economist consulted was a former employee of the major labels. Conclusion: the world would be a better (if slightly more odorous) place if Napster had never existed.

*Post-Napster

Exhibit C: The Internet vs. Vehicle Theft

With this chart, obviously the RIAA intends to show a clear correlation between the internet's introduction and the decline of vehicular theft, an unfortunate situation that has put many honest car thieves out of work. It is also hoping to prove the old adage that "illegal downloading is exactly like stealing a car -- which is why car theft declined as file sharing increased."

As the data shows, vehicle theft followed the music industry's decade-long climb from 1986-1996. Or tried to, anyway. Vehicle theft peaked in 1991 at an unsustainable level of .0066 vehicles stolen per capita. Unfortunately, the web turned these hard-working car thieves into lazy music thieves, thwarting a vehicular theft pattern that should have risen to epidemic levels over the next decade. The data points to one damning fact: you can do more financial damage with a single internet connection than has been done in the entirety of human history up to 1998.

Exhibit D: The RIAA and the Honest American Farmer

As everyone knows, Real Americans Don't Share™. And nothing is more American than farming, one of the first victims of the internet's cruel efficiency. The American farm has been on a decline since well before records were kept (ca. 1992, apparently), and the arrival of file sharing decimated both of the U.S.A.'s prime cash crops: compact discs and popcorn.

The fate of these declining industries are apparently forever intertwined, much like the essentially meaningless overlaid chart above. Both lines run downhill in an indictment of, well, everything un-American. In fact, if you look closely enough, you can see the two graph points bravely embracing each other as they weather the onslaught of progress.

And there you have it: incontrovertible proof that copyright infringement is killing American institutions one download at a time.

"Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877," Wood wrote, citing a Lime Group court filing referring to the inventor Thomas Edison. She called this an "absurd result."

On Tuesday, Judge Freeman said tough noogies, with some interesting language written in the margins of a court-endorsed memo to the parties. She scribbled -- barely legible -- that Lime Wire should enjoy enough discovery to mount a defense on the damages issue. Both Lime Wire and the labels must pick 100 works -- 80 songs and 20 albums -- that each believes to be representative of the damage (real or not) that file-sharing has on the record companies. In addition, 100 more works -- another 80 songs and 20 albums -- will be selected at random.

The story isn't encouraging or discouraging anything. That's not our role. PCMag's job is to cover all aspects of technology, which includes the products, services and activities that some groups and individuals might deem objectionable. We covered these Limewire alternatives because we knew they would be of interest to our readers. We understand that some might use them to illegally download content. We cannot encourage that action, but also cannot stop it. Reporting on the existence of these services does neither.

We have, obviously, written about many online and offline services, including some that these groups might consider legitimate or "legal." However, the fact is that some users store and manage illegally gained content in music applications like iTunes. We would not stop covering these utilities simply because some users place illegal or even inappropriate content in them.

It worries me that the music industry took this action, because it reeks of desperation. The RIAA and other music industry organizations have spent the better part of the decade fighting the digital transition, with only a shrinking business to show for it. In recent years, though, the fist of anger has turned into at least one open hand as the music industry embraces the once shunned digital music industry. Unfortunately, that warm embrace, and the change that comes with it, are not happening fast enough. Clearly the music industry is still losing money to music piracy and even the recalibrated profit margins brought on by legal music sharing services.

It's time for these music execs to pull their collective heads out of the sand and fully acknowledge and accept all the ways their industry has changed. They also have to understand that nothing will stop technology's inexorable march forward. Things will continue to change. Music downloads and sharing will never go away. These execs have to find a way to use all that technology allows and make a business that rivals the good old days of vinyl, cassette tape and even CDs.

We will continue to cover it all--as we must.

An important point of clarification, LimeWire is not “shutting down”, in specific regarding our software, we are compelled to use our best efforts cease support and distribution of the file-sharing software, along with increased filtering. And, that is what we are doing.