Illegal Music Downloading

The United State's Supreme Court recently turned away an appeal by a Minnesota woman who was ordered to pay record companies $222,000 in damages for illegally downloading songs and other copyrighted material. This has drastic implications for how we calculate damages in the US and what it takes to get a case filed in Court. Other defendants settled for $3,500 and that would lead legal scholars to believe that record companies are going after a number people to try and get settlements for claims that up until now have been hard to prove. As many will say, this is a slippery slope, so where will it stop?