It's a bad analogy to begin with. The RIAA is suing people for distributing music, not downloading it. Theoretically, these defendants could have distributed hundreds of copies of each song (although it's more likely they distributed zero copies).
It seems to me non-"internet" piracy cases are largely based on hard evidence, and when they try to include evidence for "potential to do" it's also based on some other hard-evidence, e.g. a large-scale CD-copying machine, a pallet of 100,000 blanks.
If you'd been convicted before for the same offence, then you're more likely to get more jail-time for repeat offending, i.e. a predilection for continuing that proven behaviour, but the punishment meted-out for copyright offences seems massively, unbelievably out-of-scale. Probably because they're often compensation paid to the copyright owner, rather than punishment for breaking the law.