2. Just a legal point. They aren't suing for compensatory damages. IIRC, federal copyright law allows punitive damages quite a bit higher than just compensatory damages.
I thought there was a Supreme Court ruling which said that punitive damages are unconstitutional if they exceed compensatory damages by a factor of more than 4.
Edit: The demand for $1.5 trillion is completely frivolous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages#United_States
"There is no maximum dollar amount of punitive damages that a defendant can be ordered to pay. In response to judges and juries which award high punitive damages verdicts, the Supreme Court of the United States has made several decisions which limit awards of punitive damages through the due process of law clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. In a number of cases, the Court has indicated that a 4:1 ratio between punitive and compensatory damages is broad enough to lead to a finding of constitutional impropriety, and that any ratio of 10:1 or higher is almost certainly unconstitutional.
In BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore (1996), the Court ruled that punitive damages must be reasonable, as determined based on the degree of reprehensibility of the conduct, the ratio of punitive damages to compensatory damages, and any criminal or civil penalties applicable to the conduct. In State Farm Auto. Ins. v. Campbell (2003), the Court held that punitive damages may only be based on the acts of the defendants which harmed the plaintiffs."
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