How much does the record industry want from LimeWire? Millions? Billions? Trillions? More?

By Eriq Gardner

Get out your calculator.

How much does LimeWire owe the recording industry in damages after a New York judge ruled the P2P service committed a "substantial amount of copyright infringement"?

According to the record industry's latest legal filing:

• More than 200 million copies of LimeWire's software has been downloaded
• LimeWire users generate billions of downloads every month 
• Where the defendant's conduct is willful, the range of statutory damages runs from $750 to $150,000 

"It does not require sophisticated mathematics to calculate that the likely damage award in this case will run into the hundreds of millions, if not the billions of dollars," says the memorandum.

Sounds pretty conservative. 150,000 x billions = A Google, no? (By "google," we mean either 1 followed by 100 zeroes or the profits of a certain search engine.)

The RIAA knows that it won't be getting this amount of money, which is why it's attempting to freeze the company's assets and erase it from existence.

According to a statement by a spokesperson from LimeWire, "We feel a permanent injunction could hold back the development of new digital music technologies that LimeWire is in the process of developing and does not benefit the industry."