A friend of a friend runs an independent midsize hotel here in Germany.
They used to offer free internet access. Then one of their guests used the connection to download copyrighted stuff.
In due course a nasty letter from a lawyer arrived, demanding payment of around 1000€ and as fighting and losing would have been much more expensive, they payed. They were unable to recover the money, because there was no way to prove which of their guests at that time was responsible.
The very next thing they did was to shut down the free internet and bring in an outside company to provide it (with per day and per hour fees for the guests).
The reasons:
1) By having someone else legally responsible for the internet connection, they don't have any liability for future copyright violations.
2) All guests are now "helping" to pay back the money they lost.