Capital Records vs Jamie Thomas where Capital Records was awarded around 2 million in damages and Sony vs Joel Tenenbaum. These cases are not uncommon.
Those cases are extremely uncommon. In nearly every case what happened was:
1. The RIAA sent a letter telling how many songs you were distributing and offering a settlement of around $2-5 per song. Most people at this point realized that they were in fact guilty and that the RIAA had enough evidence to prove it in court and agreed to settle.
2. A small fraction ignored this or refused to settle. The RIAA then files lawsuits in some of those cases, typically over a small number of the songs that the person was distributing rather than over all the songs being distributed.
At this point most defendants would get a lawyer and be told that they will almost certainly lose and advised to settle.
3. A handful of people ignored their lawyers (or had crappy lawyers) and plowed on. Their extraordinarily bad decision making often continued during their trial. Thomas for instance lied in court and tried to destroy evidence.
This is not wise since in these suits the plaintiff is asking for statutory damages, which is a minimum of $750 per song (not per download--if you were offering 2 songs for download and they were each download 1000 times the minimum is 2 x $750, not 2000 x $750) but can go up to $30000, and it is the jury that determines the amount in that range. You really want the jury to find you sympathetic, and lying and trying to destroy evidence doesn't help with that.
4. After the inevitable victory in most cases that got far the RIAA would again offer to settle for an amount much lower than the damages awarded by the court, although higher than their original settlement offer.
I don't know how many reached this stage, but if many did most of them came to their senses and realized that appealing would probably only make it worse.
The very small number that didn't are the ones that ended up like the two cases you cited.
You want federal then take a step out and look at all the people who got 10-15 years for carrying an quarter ounce of weed. Sentencing is very selective based on who they want to make an example of and when.
Which isn't applicable to the law being proposed. Moreover if the idea is "threaten them with the full 20 years to serve as an example", then the mandatory minimum kinda works against that? If you catch some guy and then he serves 10 years, you haven't really proven much. You're just acting in line with expectations.
>You want federal then take a step out and look at all the people who got 10-15 years for carrying an quarter ounce of weed.
Source? My impression is that in basically all of those cases, it's either because:
1. the guy is a repeat offender and/or on probation
2. the guy decided to wanted to fight to the bitter end and they threw the book at them
I'm not saying either are justified, but the implication that someone will get 20 years just because he downloaded deepseek through ollama or whatever is still false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records%2C_Inc._v._Tho...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_v._Tenenbaum