AND FINALLY

In case you hadn’t noticed – perhaps downloading yer music from other other P2P sources, the internet filesharing service ‘LimeWire’ went pop and was closed down last October, after eventually losing a protracted legal battle in the States.

They were up against all the big swinging corporate hitters of the industry, Arista, Atlantic, Capitol, Elektra, Sony, Warner, and others - with an unimaginable number of lawyers between them - all determined to make an example of LimeWire in the hopes of ultimately crushing free filesharing on the web. Well they do have their profitable multi-billion pound business of flogging second rate culture to the masses to protect.

But their collective sense of self-worth goes way beyond this. The case has now moved on to the punishment stage with court dates set for May. But ahead of that, this week a New York judge threw out the plaintiffs pre-hearing submission for its wonky workings out of what LimeWire has cost them.

By their own reckoning, that figure should be somewhere in the region of er, 75 trillion dollars – or about 7 global credit crunch bailouts combined. With understatement the judge ruled, “The absurdity of this result is one of the factors that has motivated other courts to reject Plaintiffs’ damages theory”, telling them to get lost and come back something more sane. That’s rock’n’roll for you.