...after a woman is fined $2.4m for downloading...24 songs.
This is beyond ubelievable, even beyond unfucking believable. It is a self-parodying joke of a justice verdict. Much like the 999 year prison term, this verdict basically shows that the justice system is totally warped when it comes to assessing damages, and that both the jurists and the RIAA are a bunch of punitive, stupid fools.
At the same time, in this article in Ars Technica, a former music industry executive admits (sort of) that the music industry should have tried to co-opt Napster when it first appeared, instead of trying to sue it out of existence.As the article explains, there is a strong whiff of historical revisionism in his comments. At the time, the attitude of the music industry towards services like Napster was one of unremitting hostility. As the article explains:

Liquid Audio, for instance, was trying to launch a DRM-protected music service years before iTunes. As Liquid Audio exec Gerry Kearby tells the story, "One day in a moment of pure honesty, [a Sony rep] said, 'Look, Kearby, my job is to keep you down. We don't ever want you to succeed.' Some of them were more interested in experimenting than others, there's no doubt about it. But they were, in effect, buggy-whip manufacturers, trying to keep the auto at bay as long as they could."

So not much has changed then...despite the apparently greater willingness to embrace digital downloading, the industry is still pushing lawsuits against a woman downloading 24 songs. Talk about using a nuclear bomb to open a nut.
UPDATE - An appeals judge has inserted some common sense into the process by slashing the damages amount down to $54,000. This is still an absurd sum out of all proportion to the actual damaged caused, and it seems that the judge was unhappy with the verdict on a broader front:

Judge Davis wrote that he arrived at the $54,000 figure by tripling the $750 minimum, thus arriving at $2,250 per song. He wrote that were it his decision, he might have reduced it even further.
"It was the jury's province to determine the award ... and this Court has merely reduced that award to the maximum amount that is no longer monstrous and shocking," he wrote.