Australia

"Default judgement", meaning nobody turned up to plead their case in whatever court and jurisdiction this was in.

So this woman sold 1 shirt, someone else sold 275,000, someone else sold 1200 coffee mugs, and so on and so forth until Grumpy Cat Enterprises™ gets the shits and goes to court with a case against multiple plaintiffs. Then in the absence of any defense all the alleged guilty parties get slapped with a default USD100K. The lawyers take 60 percent for fees and GCE gets a potential income of a few million or so.

All of which means very fucking little if the judgement is in East Texas and you're in South East Asia as it's going to be pretty tough to collect, but it might mean something if you live in Australia. Being a civil matter, it's pretty unlikely to go any further than being a note in a file somewhere, I'm not even sure if this could get on to Australian credit reports.

But the single sale of a shirt just before all this happened sounds extremely suspicious, like a fishing expedition to get enough people to make it worthwhile to go to court.

How can you call that logic? Clearly, as she must pay $24m for a copyright claim, then those corporations ought to also pay around $24m for their legal obligations.

You're right. The intent of copyright was ostensibly to protect artists' ability to make a living off their work.