I read that Jammie Thomas has appealed against the punishment (a $220,000 fine) in her case vs. Sony BMG, Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings Inc., Capitol Records Inc. and Warner Bros. Records Inc. It seems to me there is a simple way to compute the actual damages in this case: simply do the bandwidth calculation. Assume some figures: a 256Kb/s upload, average mp3 file size of 5MB. Then take the ISP logs to show how long she had that IP address lease (let’s say a week). This puts an upper bound on the number of songs she can possibly have distributed. According to my calculations this is:
(256*1024 * 7*60*60*24) / (8*5*1024*1024) = 3780.
And at a dollar per song on (pick your download service) that brings the maximum actual damages to $3780.