[tzs]

The RIAA typically asked for around $2-4 per song to settle without a lawsuit, which would come to a total of a few thousand because they generally only went after people sharing over a thousand songs.

In the couple of few where the party would not agree to a settlement and the RIAA sued, they would pick about 15 of the thousand+ songs to sue over. Statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per infringed work, so the total would now be about 3-5 times what their settlement offer amount had been.

Most parties then got a lawyer, the lawyer told the party that had no chance, and they would then seriously negotiate with the RIAA and get a settlement.

Only a couple would still not settle, went to trial, and did an absolutely terrible job and the judge/jury awarded well above the minimum statutory damages. The RIAA still tried to settle for well below that, but the defendants refused and kept trying to fight and did not have a happy time.

[ariwilson]

Weird to hear a full throated defense of the RIAA here

[beering]

A summary of what happened is not a full-throated defense of anyone.

[nadermx]

How is that classifed as a summary? Cursory search, https://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/riaa_at_four.pdf

[tzs]

Looks like I had a few memory errors. First I forgot that in the first phase, when they were able to identify people using DMCA subpoenas, they had a used a mix of suing first and offering a settlement first.

Then in the second phase when they lost the ability to identify people that way they switched to filing "John Doe" lawsuits, which then allowed them to get subpoenas to identify who owned the IP address where the uploads came from.

I'd completely forgotten about that. In most cases they offered a settlement once they had a name but still, there was a lawsuit. (If they couldn't get a settlement, or didn't even want to ask for one, they could amend the lawsuit to name the real person and proceed).

[inigyou]

How did the 200 million dollar lawsuits for one song come about then?

[tzs]

There has never been one song that has come anywhere near that over copyright infringement.

For file sharing lawsuits they all ask for "statutory" damages. Those are in the range from $750 to $30000 in the US (but can be lowered to as low as $250 in the case of an "innocent infringer" [1] or raised to as much as $150000 in the case of a "willful infringer" [2]).

These damages are per work infringed, so even if someone were found to be a willful infringer for sharing a song, and the court found their behavior so egregious that it went all the way to $150000, and the person had made and distributed a vast number of copies, it would still only by $150000 because it is not per copy. (Well, it might be per copy in a way...in deciding were to land on the $750-$150000 scale the court may have considered the number of copies).

There have been copyright and copyright adjacent lawsuits over songs that have hit $200 million in the aggregate, but those all involved large collections of songs. Some examples:

• Limp Bizkit sued their record label for $200+ million saying they had concealed that much in royalties that they owed the band.

• There was a $200 million suit by music publishers against Roblox for allowing users to upload and stream commercial compositions without paying the writers.

• There's a massive suit underway I believe against some AI music generation companies.

As far as I know the biggest ever over an individual song was an award of $7.4 million against "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over accusations that the infringed Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give it Up". (That was reduced later to $5.3 million plus 50% of future "Blurred Lines" publishing and songwriting royalties).

[1] Someone who did not know they were infringing and had no reason to know. This almost never applies when pirating things you know are commercial recordings.