Furthermore, in most copyright lawsuits that nerds like us actually care about (i.e. ones involving service providers and not actual artists or publishers), the number of works infringed is so high that the judge can just work backwards from the desired damage award and never actually hit the statutory damages cap. If the statutory damages limit was actually reached in basically any intermediary liability case, we'd be talking about damage awards higher than the US GDP.

Linear arithmetic is one hell of a drug.