Huh, TIL.
Regarding your edit, that amount wasn’t the cumulated cost of whatever Limewire were distributing, that would be idiotic indeed; rather the RIAA tried to call for a ruling that somehow those guys were causing $150,000 in damages - per instance. Now the article unfortunately doesn’t state how they possibly tried to justify that number, and I can’t be bothered to research that myself. Another thing that would interest me is how the plaintiff expected them to pay with almost every dollar on Earth.
So while I don’t think this had anything to do with “lost sales”, I do agree with the possible fines and damage calculations not being fit for any sort of realistic purpose at all.
Because you don’t need to have significant experience or rent a VPS in order to do that, and I can respect that. We don’t need to force FOSS developers to become proficient in everything.
What needs to happen is some kind of tool (ideally FOSS) that lets you spin up an actual forum with the same difficulty to set it up as Discord.