There is no doubt in any American’s mind that we are a litigious country. We love our laws and go to great lengths to protect those laws–either through military conflicts such as the Iraq and Afghan wars–but closer to home, we have become a society that sees using the legal system to not only resolve issues, but to profit from those rulings.

When were the days when we were just satisfied to have a win in our favor and reasonable damages awarded for the harm inflicted?

I look at one case in particular, as Judge Kimba Wood has recently ruled that peer-to-peer file sharing service LimeWire infringes copyright. Now this in itself is certainly reprehensible; however, what makes this situation move from the legal to unethical is what Attorney Kelly Klaus is seeking in terms of damages–1.5 Trillion dollars. Yes folks, that’s 1,500,000,000,000.00 dollars in damages at a cost of $750 per download.

Let’s just take a look at the math. Last I checked, you could download a song for about .99 cents, or an album for between $14.99-$24.99. Movies generally range from $9.99 to $39.99 for your high end Blu-Ray disks. Movie or Television series run anywhere from $49.99 to several hundred dollars. But certainly each download could not have been several hundred dollars, let alone $750! If someone downloads 1 song, shouldn’t that one download only be worth .99 cents plus a certain percentage for additional costs and an additional penalty fee for the infringement? That one song, I can’t see being worth more than a few dollars when everything is said and done–at the most.

And yet the RIAA continues to seek ridiculous settlements and damages to compensate for a soft economy. Is it the fact that people are downloading more that causes their bottom lines to become leaner and leaner? Or is it because the music, films, and TV being produced has become less and less quality and people just don’t see spending $14.99 for the CD and would rather just either download the 1 song or purchase it for .99 cents from iTunes or Amazon MP3 services? With advents of Video-OnDemand through Amazon and more notably Netflix Instant Play, people are renting less, buying even less, and choosing to watch what’s available or just renting it through Netflix through one low cost monthly subscription fee. The convergence of all of these events has lead to the recession within the entertainment industry–not because people are downloading more.

Furthermore, I submit that if the RIAA and the entertainment world believes that their content or IP is worth 1.5 trillion dollars, do they realize that the total cost of both the Iraq and Afghan wars is just over 1 trillion dollars? The economies of scale just don’t seem to add up here.

What we need here is a bit of common sense. What the RIAA should be doing is to support on-demand or more streaming content to support the direction of viewing/listening habits of the people they are serving their content to. People don’t want to spend money for an album that has 15 tracks of nonsense and 1-2 tracks that are really worth while to them. People are more likely to pay one yearly subscription cost to a service like Pandora and get unlimited music play than to pay to own hundreds or thousands of CD’s, or even hold that many MP3′s on a drive somewhere–guess what storing all that music is getting costly too and why go through that hassle? Services like Lala, Last.fm, Grooveshark, Pandora, and Spotify, many of which are available on popular mobile platforms like your Blackberry, iPhone, and Androids, the evolution of music and content viewing is changing before our very eyes. The old institutions that the RIAA holds on to are starting to or have already begun to wane, and they in addition to the rest of the industry needs to accept the fact that their losses are just that. Changes to the way people use services will have a direct impact to how much revenue they will receive. And year over year, they cannot continue to expect large growth numbers when more and more people are moving away from the “I own that” model for Music and Movies.

Additionally we need to look at improving our legal system to evolve as rapidly as our behaviors. Certainly when these laws were drawn up, these types of damages made sense given the types of cases that they would expect to deal with. Now, perhaps not so much anymore. And let’s not completely absolve the downloader’s from this. Just as the industry needs to change, with the availability of legitimate low-cost content, illegal downloading just doesn’t make sense anymore. If you are completely at a loss if you are unable to see the full series of Lost and what’s on Netflix instant play or Hulu is not enough, pony up the dollars and purchase the DVD set or buy it used from eBay or Craigslist. If you don’t want to spend that amount, clearly the need to watch this series is not as strong as you thought it was. If it is, then you see the value in both the content as well as supporting the providers of that content, and all the power to you.

We all are both victims of these types of lawsuits for profit, but also are all contributors to that same issue. When we try and remove ourselves from the problem we ignore our part in societies acceptance of these types of illegal download practices. We all should help each other promote legitimate sources of content and recognize that illegal downloading is harmful–maybe not to you today, but when someone faces these types of lawsuits (I take case against Jammie Thomas-Rasset and the ruling that $2 million dollars is justified compensation for downloading 24 songs) we all lose–the only ones that win are the plaintiff’s, in this case the RIAA.