People did actually have to pay those fines in Germany for a while. It was pretty insane. There were even house searches where the police confiscated everything electronic they could find, potentially for months. It's not as bad anymore, IIRC some laws were also changed that sets maximum fines for this kind of stuff. But it's still pretty harsh.

However, this is only true for torrenting. Because this was treated as "distributing copyrighted material" since you were uploading while downloading. (Don't ask me if there was some sort of byte limit, I'd like to know that too.)

Downloading from other places (where you don't upload at the same time) was never really prosecuted since the "damages" would've been laughable anyway, plus it would have been way harder to get the IPs.