In any case, the "
lost sale" doctrine is always inherently flawed, because it presumes that those downloading have unlimited entertainment budgets. No one can spend more on copies of information property than they have in discretionary income, and thus the purchase of one copy precludes the purchase of another.
It would be easy enough to presume that everyone is always spending their entire entertainment budget, and a dearth of funds for legal purchases may be why they are obtaining illegal copies. By this reasoning, the damage done due to piracy is always zero. But that's just as clearly bunk.
Some people pirate so they can spend their money on something else--something they would not have otherwise purchased if they were compelled to spend money on the information copy they might have preferred. Thus the media company is damaged because someone spent money on something else they didn't strictly need. Even by this argument, the damages would have to be capped by calculating the total discretionary income of all illegal copyholders and summing them. IP addresses assigned to an ISP serving US residential customers could likely be associated with a number for the median discretionary household income in that census tract.
You can't reasonably say that a homeless person who illegally copied 80 GB of music files from a public library computer is costing the music industry $80 million in lost sales. That person has negative discretionary income. They wouldn't ordinarily buy music until after paying for food, utilities, and rent. You might be able to argue that having already copied the music, they won't buy it when they finally do have the money to do so, but that's not strictly true. A lot of pirates do "settle up", so to speak, for the works they enjoyed most when they finally do get some extra money, by buying things legally when they previously copied them illegally.
So the sky-high plaintiff's calculations involve a lot of assumptions and shortcuts, and a competent defense would surely be able to cut them down to more reasonable, if still practically unrecoverable, numbers. But the court has no need to review those arguments unless the defendant is found liable in some way. Perhaps examination could be triggered even without finding of liability if there were also a counterclaim that the mere magnitude of the accusation constitutes defamation? I am not a lawyer, so I wouldn't know.