Those cases are extremely uncommon. In nearly every case what happened was:

1. The RIAA sent a letter telling how many songs you were distributing and offering a settlement of around $2-5 per song. Most people at this point realized that they were in fact guilty and that the RIAA had enough evidence to prove it in court and agreed to settle.

2. A small fraction ignored this or refused to settle. The RIAA then files lawsuits in some of those cases, typically over a small number of the songs that the person was distributing rather than over all the songs being distributed.

At this point most defendants would get a lawyer and be told that they will almost certainly lose and advised to settle.

3. A handful of people ignored their lawyers (or had crappy lawyers) and plowed on. Their extraordinarily bad decision making often continued during their trial. Thomas for instance lied in court and tried to destroy evidence.

This is not wise since in these suits the plaintiff is asking for statutory damages, which is a minimum of $750 per song (not per download--if you were offering 2 songs for download and they were each download 1000 times the minimum is 2 x $750, not 2000 x $750) but can go up to $30000, and it is the jury that determines the amount in that range. You really want the jury to find you sympathetic, and lying and trying to destroy evidence doesn't help with that.

4. After the inevitable victory in most cases that got far the RIAA would again offer to settle for an amount much lower than the damages awarded by the court, although higher than their original settlement offer.

I don't know how many reached this stage, but if many did most of them came to their senses and realized that appealing would probably only make it worse.

The very small number that didn't are the ones that ended up like the two cases you cited.

Civil vs criminal. Federal sentencing guidelines don't apply.

I finally got around to watching "The Internet's Own Boy" the other day. He told his girlfriend as they were driving by the Whitehouse that didn't want to accept the plea deal and plead guilty "because felons can't work in that building" [the Whitehouse]. Oh, man, how times have changed.

Thanks for proving my point. Schwartz was offered 6 months in a minimum security prison, but he declined it because he specifically wanted a trial. Moreover that was for effectively DoSing JSTOR, a much more serious crime than some guy using a vpn to download an AI model. I don't think 6 months was justified, nor the string of crimes he was charged with, but OP's assertion that "You get less jail time for committing 34 felonies" is still false.

>During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison if Swartz pled guilty to 13 federal crimes. Swartz and his lead attorney rejected the deal, opting instead for a trial where prosecutors would be forced to justify their pursuit of him.