There were two cases in the US with huge fines that I am aware of, and in both cases the person had to work very hard to get those fines.

In the first, there was a women who was distributing around 1700 songs. The copyright owners asked her to stop and to pay $3 per song, which is an amazingly fair price. She had no possible plausible defense, because she had in fact downloaded and was in fact distributing 1700 songs that she knew she had no legal right to distribute. If the ~$5000 that would cost would have been too large a burden on her, she should have tried to negotiate a lower settlement.

Nope. She refused to deal with it until sued. So they sued, over 15 of the songs. Why 15 instead of all 1700? I'll get to that later. A non-idiotic person at that point would have said, "Oh...they are serious" and offered to take that original settlement offer.

Not her. She made them take it to trial. She was terrible at trial. She lied on the stand. It came out that she had tried to destroy evidence. She tried to blame her young children for the uploading.

So of course she lost.

In civil copyright law in the US, there are two kinds of damages: actual and statutory. Actual damages are easy to understand in theory. They are the actual losses attributable to the infringement. In practice, it is almost never possible to reasonably figure out what actual damages are. At best, you are going to have to have both plaintiff and defendant bring in expert witness economists and market analysts who are going to argue over what they should be.

So instead the plaintiff can elect to ask for statutory damages. Statutory damages are between $750 and $30000 per infringed work. Note that it is per work, not per copy. The jury decides the amount in the statutory range. The low end can be reduced to $200 for "innocent infringement", and the high end raised to $150000 for "willful infringement".

The problem with statutory damages is that when they were enacted the legislature was envisioning commercial copyright infringement. No one anticipated that we'd ever have a situation where ordinary people were infringing on a large scale. They probably should undergo a tune up to give a separate, lower range for that kind of infringement.

I suspect that this is one of the reasons that they only sued over 15 songs. Minimal statutory damages of $750/song x 15 songs = $11250. That means that if she had not been a complete idiot at trial, the jury probably would have went with something close to the low end, getting plaintiffs about what they originally wanted to settle for, plus a bit more because they had to go through the trouble of actually litigating the thing.

The other reason for only suing over 15 is that when you sue over a given song, you have to document that the song is under copyright, that you own the copyright or are representing the copyright owner, that all the necessary paperwork has been filed at the copyright office (US copyright law does not require registration any more--that went away long ago when it was updated to be more compatible with the rest of the world--but does require registration before you can sue. Oh, and I think you can only win actual damages that occurred after registration, so if you don't register until you need to sue someone statutory damages are the way to go).

For every song you include in the suit, the defendant is going to challenge the copyright status, your ownership or your representation of the owner, the correctness of the registration, and so on. Since 15 or so songs is enough with minimal statutory damages to get what you actually wanted in the first place, there is no point in adding in the extra work to do more songs.

It would probably would have worked out that way if the defendant had been reasonable, but things like perjury, trying to frame your young kids, and trying to destroy evidence don't make juries sympathetic and inclined toward the low end of the statutory damages scale. They went quit a bit up the scale, and she got hit with a big fine.

And guess what the RIAA then did? The offered to settle for something like $15k.

She declined, appealed, and has continued to draw this out, including having at least one more trial, and losing at every step of the way.

I don't remember the details of the other case, other than he wasn't a complete idiot like the defendant in the above case, but still had to work pretty hard at it to get the numbers up there.