The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has started a lawsuit against the Russian online music site, AllOfMP3.com for $1.6 trillion.

Although it has been known that the RIAA intended to sue Mediaservices, which owns AllofMP3.com and allTunes.com, for illegally flogging copyrighted music, it was not clear how much or how the recording industry lobby group intended to do it.

According to Zeropaid.com, it seems that RIAA wants $150,000 for each of the 11 million songs allegedly pirated.

RIAA is taking its court action in New York and not in Russia where AllofMP3 operates. An AllofMP3 company spokesman pointed out that his company does not operate in New York so the suit is unjustified. The company obeys Russian copyright laws and even pays a chunk of its profits to the RIAA's equivalent in that country. It pays the standard 15 per cent Russian licensing fee that applies to online music to ROM, the Russian Organisation for Multimedia.

However, RIAA denies the right of ROM to exist, because the organisation has negotiated Internet deals that would weaken the RIAA's case if they were adopted globally and these fees are lower than RIAA deems acceptable to itself.

This news article was written on January 2, 2007, quoting The Inquirer.