A Bronx woman will have to pay the RIAA $6,050 for making songs available to download on Kazaa. That works out to something like $756 per song (there were eight songs in question).
The case, Electra v. Barker, matters a little more than serving as anti-RIAA fodder. The RIAA was trying to argue that merely making songs available in a shared folder was tantamount to copyright infringement. If that were the case, the RIAA wouldn’t have to prove that anyone actually downloaded songs from your computer (that is, that you actually uploaded songs). That seems, I don’t know, unfair, but my days of freaking out at the RIAA are over.
What’s the worst that can happen to someone who refuses to pay such a settlement? Are you looking at jailtime for downloading some songs?