A bit over $1.00 per movie? Seems way too low.
Drudge says 3000.
Just imagine how big the fine would be if he downloaded them all!
I suspect the resitution is not really in line with what it would cost if the DVDs were handed back to Netflix for repackaging ~ odds are they'll simply destroy them since sorting them out would be prohibititvely expensive.
The restitution would be based on a computation of the cost of refilling an order ~ so it's just coincidental.
We had this problem with the music houses earlier. They'd mark "do not return" on pieces that couldn't be delivered. USPS could do nothing but discard them, and then the companies (Columbia, GBH, etc.) would complain about people going to the dump and getting free DVDs. USPS, though, charged a fee for "do not deliver" on that stuff ~ once they reorganized forwarding and return service to accommodate the mailorder music business (and some other mail order stuff). Exact accounting was needed. Still, if the companies wanted to make sure the returns were properly disposed of by chopping, slopping, burning and churning, they would need to take them back from USPS. That, too, had a separate fee.
This finally got so complex there were about 25 analysts at Headquarters assigned in 3 or 4 different departments working on just the mail order music company CD problem.
I did not get involved, so don't complain to me about it.
Netflix came along some years later and their problem was worse ~ again, their out of pocket costs for an undelivered DVD were probably les sthan $0.50, but the value imputed to the DVDs by the public were far higher.
Theft from curbside and rural delivery receptacles has always been a problem.