This is similar to the fantasty that the value of a publicly traded company is number of shares issued x last cost per share.
That assumption fails to take into account that it is unlikely that
a) you would get the same price (as a minimum) for all shares,
b) that there is sufficient liquid cash in the monetary system to fund the purchases for all companies,
c) that there would be sufficient willing buyers for said stocks.
These loss estimates are just a case of someone putting a monsterously big number up to get a prosecutor to pay attention. If the RIAA were
to go into court and be candid about the true value of some of this media, they would get zero attention. I have always thought
that is a waste of government money to pursuit the majority of copyright claims, as the cost of the prosecution of the offenders
is greater than the benefit derived by the government via taxation and civil fines, and in many cases, to the original author.
At some point, there needs to be
a better balance between the nature of any published work (that, at some level, anything you say or do is spread to the winds and uncontrollable once you release it from your control) vs. the government enforcing artificial monopolies at times where it doesn't make sense financially. I say it is
time to shorten the periods of copyright protection before the legal system strangles on litigation....
There is also the question of copyright protections for publicly published works that are no longer available commerically (not through the desire of the author, but due to the inherent economic friction of carrying costs for titles that produced in quantities exceeding apparent marginal demand. How much obligation does the government have to protect publishers that guess wrong in the short term? in the long term? individual authors? Who should bear these enforcement costs, and when should these costs fall back to the copyright holder?
