[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

The question becomes did the courts grant that $250,000? Or was this like a class action suit where all those people charged were tried at once?

As mentioned, Google is your friend. These lawsuits are easy enough to find:

Minnesota woman to pay $220,000 fine for 24 illegally downloaded songs

12-year-old settles music swap lawsuit

And there's this: After an Internet subscriber's identity is discovered, but before an individual lawsuit is filed, the subscriber is typically offered an opportunity to settle. The standard settlement is a payment to the RIAA and an agreement not to engage in file-sharing of music and is usually on par with statutory damages of $750 per work, with the RIAA choosing the number of works it deems "reasonable." For cases that do not settle at this amount, the RIAA has gone to trial, seeking statutory damages from the jury, written into The Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 as between $750 and $30,000 per work or $750 and $150,000 per work if "willful."

These are of course old stories since my point was that even though industry groups have sued individual pirates, and won, the backlash was so great that it is a rarity nowadays.