Actually John, you miss the entire point of a punitive lawsuit.
The idea of civil action is to punish the perpetrator for their wrong doing, and discourage them from doing it (and similar things) again. On top of this, going to court and fighting a company is VERY stressful, even if you don't have to worry about legal fees, you've still got all the time and effort you were forced to invest in this. Simply getting a reimbursement for the actual value of an item/damages is not worthwhile the way the system works, nor is it likely to do anything to discourage whatever practice they were involved in. In fact the legal song and dance routine is used by companies to actively discourage people from seeking justice against them... it's really that much of a pain.
Generally speaking the bigger the company/individual being accused is, the larger the amount of money needed to make a punitive suit meaningful. Truthfully given the size of Sony, I think seeking five million dollars is actually ridiculously low. For a multi-national that's barely noticible. In the final equasion they would probably rather absorb the occasional 5 million dollar hit, than adjust their practices, especially seeing as they quite likely make more money off of what their doing than they lose.
To really make a differance to Sony over something like "bricking" or the whole Linux compadibility issue, you'd need to hit them for hundreds of millions of dollars. Anything short of that would barely be noticed. Personally if *I* ever felt the need to go after a major corperation, the amount of money I'd be after would be equivilent to one quarter's (3 months) profits. Profits being computed after the expenses of running the company, so for all screaming and yelling, nobody would technically have to lose their job or anything (despite what they might claim) in the end it would be the guys at the very top who pocket those earnings being the ones losing the money. THAT would hit them hard enough to be noticed.
See, while I agree with the entire "frivilous lawsuits" thing on principle, I think most people have no idea what a frivilous lawsuit actually is. A problem lawsuit would be like if someone happened to trip on a bump, and then put a store out of business with a billion dollar lawsuit or whatever. The problem largely being when people can effectively sue for anything, and the amount of money being ridiculous not only for the damage done, but also with the size of the perpetrator. The idea being that the (genuinely) smaller the target, the less that should be done punitively beyond the cost of the damages, because it takes less to be noticible.
To use the classic example of the lady who spilled her Mcdonald's Coffee, that suit wasn't quite as bad as many people made it out to be on a lot of levels. The amount of money for example was in proportion to the size of Mcdonalds as a company, if your sueing them for damages and want to force them to take responsibility and change policies, you have to hit them so hard that they can't just make the problem go away out of petty cash. The case of the Mcdonald's Coffee being one where the suit was inappropriate due to shared responsibility. The Coffee WAS too hot, spilling a liquid beverage you are supposed to drink should not do so much damage that you require skin grafts afterwards. But at the same token she should have had it in a drink holder, I believe she had it between her legs while trying to drive (which is inconveinent as all heck, and asking for trouble). Of course Mcdonalds also got VERY lucky, not just in getting the suit heard again (and avoiding a lot of damages after paying the medical bills). By all reports had she tried to drink that coffee and swallowed some of it, she could have killed herself. It was THAT hot.
In the case of this suit however, there is no shared responsibility between the accuser and the defendant. The "bricking" occurs through legitimate, unexceptional use of the product.
I'm guessing from the way this sounds, Squeenix and Sony acknowlege the problem, but neither want to take responsibility to make things right. Their attitude basically being "we're big companies, who really cares about the people with bricked systems? we just don't want to pay the bill". If they force you to go to court, it's important that if you win they be hit hard enough to feel it.
