Given your numbers an illegal file sharer can calculate their monthly financial risk from RIAA lawsuits.
Your numbers are:
Time (T)=8 months
Probability (P)=1/25290
Cost (C)=3000
With monthly financial risk = (P*C)/T, if each month you put away 1.483 cents, you would on average have enough money to pay your settlement fees by the time you were sued.
Sure, as long as you live 16,857.72 years before you get hit with a lawsuit(OK, ignoring compounding). Otherwise you're abusing statistics just a weee bit here. Assuming no more than 1 lawsuit in your life, you are either going to pay $0 over your lifespan or you're going to pay $3,000... but there is no "average" payout for an individual user. So if you do get caught you're paying out a lot more than the average payout per user--i.e. the average that includes all the people not caught.
However, getting back to your insurance idea, yes your numbers start to make sense if everyone sharing files put in 1.483 cents per month into an insurance pool, and all the enforcement rates stayed the same, they enforce exactly every 8 months, sue exactly the same number of people each time, etc., then there would be exactly enough money to pay out the average number of settlements incurred among the insured population. There's no variance... every 8 months the insurance company has collected exactly as much money as the RIAA sues for. But as the number of people buying insurance becomes a smaller than 100% fraction of the file-sharing population size, then the variability of how much the insured population might have to pay out increases. And either the insurees will have to pay out a higher premium to ensure a high chance of full coverage, or they will face some non-zero probability that the they could get unlucky (a higher-than-average number of insured users gets slapped with a lawsuit) and the insurance fund goes bankrupt. Having a fund total of less than $3000 times the minimum of {the total number of people sued every 8 months, the total number of people in the fund} at any time means there is a non-zero risk of fund bankruptcy. Of course you'd pay an actuary handsomely to figure out just exactly what the fund's risk was and set the premiums to minimize it to an acceptable value.
The opposite extreme case is what you have now--there is no insurance pool, and everyone acts as an individual, not setting aside any money per month for the chance one might get sued. Individual people face a low risk of getting caught at the moment, and so most people never ever see a lawsuit, and the tiny risk ended up being worth it for them. But then there's the very unfortunate few who do and then have to deal with the $3000 fee without having put any money in a "contingency fund" to deal with it.
Personally, I believe that even if you could legalize insuring filesharing it would just lead to more lawsuits with higher penalties, because the RIAA would see a pool of targets with money specifically set aside to pay to them. Not to mention that they would almost certainly try to figure out what exactly which file sharers were insured, thus raising the probability an insured user gets caught above the probability a non-insured user gets caught.
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However, getting back to your insurance idea, yes your numbers start to make sense if everyone sharing files put in 1.483 cents per month into an insurance pool, and all the enforcement rates stayed the same, they enforce exactly every 8 months, sue exactly the same number of people each time, etc., then there would be exactly enough money to pay out the average number of settlements incurred among the insured population. There's no variance... every 8 months the insurance company has collected exactly as much money as the RIAA sues for. But as the number of people buying insurance becomes a smaller than 100% fraction of the file-sharing population size, then the variability of how much the insured population might have to pay out increases. And either the insurees will have to pay out a higher premium to ensure a high chance of full coverage, or they will face some non-zero probability that the they could get unlucky (a higher-than-average number of insured users gets slapped with a lawsuit) and the insurance fund goes bankrupt. Having a fund total of less than $3000 times the minimum of {the total number of people sued every 8 months, the total number of people in the fund} at any time means there is a non-zero risk of fund bankruptcy. Of course you'd pay an actuary handsomely to figure out just exactly what the fund's risk was and set the premiums to minimize it to an acceptable value.
The opposite extreme case is what you have now--there is no insurance pool, and everyone acts as an individual, not setting aside any money per month for the chance one might get sued. Individual people face a low risk of getting caught at the moment, and so most people never ever see a lawsuit, and the tiny risk ended up being worth it for them. But then there's the very unfortunate few who do and then have to deal with the $3000 fee without having put any money in a "contingency fund" to deal with it.
Personally, I believe that even if you could legalize insuring filesharing it would just lead to more lawsuits with higher penalties, because the RIAA would see a pool of targets with money specifically set aside to pay to them. Not to mention that they would almost certainly try to figure out what exactly which file sharers were insured, thus raising the probability an insured user gets caught above the probability a non-insured user gets caught.