Remember Limewire? They’re on the Hook for $105 Million
Well, it could have been worse. When Limewire was on trial for all its P2P transgressions, they could have been liable for TRILLIONS of dollars (the figure thrown around was $75 trillion, which is more-or-less equal to all the money in the world. (Seriously. It is. The math has been done.) Then the record industry decided to ask for a mere $1.4 billion.
With that all in the rearview mirror, founder Mark Gorton is probably happy that the final damages for copyright infringement will be just $105 million. Still, he won’t be going out for dinner for a few years.
That LimeWire crashed is not the end of file sharing, but the beginning of only a dozen more that will take it's place, and that's not even counting bit torrents.
And for the RIAA that's the good news.
The good news for artists in general is that this service made it possible for hundreds of millions of music legally purchased by those who never would have bothered had the not been able to downloaded shared files to test drive artists they never heard of our would consider for money.
No, it probably wasn't through a record store. No, it probably wasn't through one of the 4 corporations that have an oligopoly on middle-tier ownership of rights to art.
These days, all you need is the artist and the person willing to pay for the art, which in turns funds the artist to continue to produce more art which other will enjoy again, and pay for.
No where in this model is a middle-man. They can sue, threaten, coerce, badger, scream at, and water down the final product artists never originally intended all they want. But this will only continue.