RIAA to Limewire: You Owe Us $72 Trillion

UPDATE: Billboard.biz reports that this case was well over a year old and that the RIAA actually settled with LimeWire for $105 million in May 2011. We regret running the story without the proper research.

ORIGINAL STORY: Remember LimeWire? That pirating service that enabled everyone music fans to steal any digital album or song they desired? Well, it's completely defunct now, but that doesn't mean it's out of the legal woods.

According to AV Club, music biz police the RIAA are suing the peer-to-peer network for an exorbitant amount: A whopping $72 Trillion. That's a lot of cash, you might say, and quite possibly one of the largest sums ever conjured in a courtroom.

"An award based on the RIAA calculations would amount to 'more money than the entire music industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877," Judge Kimba Wood states in documents filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The estimated overall worth of the entire planet is around $60 trillion. Hey, we think music is a valuable commodity, too, but this is a little excessive.

Even though Judge Wood claims the fine to be "absurd," that won't stop Limewire from getting pummeled in court. The digital company is accused of making 11,000 statutory infractions which could add up to a $1 billion fee.

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