The RIAA paid 64 million dollars in legal expenses, collected 1 million 361 thousand
 

Not much financial return. The question left unanswered is, has illegal downloading been reduced? And facts are left out - is that collected, or judgements? If the judgements are higher than that, and I suspect they are, the amount eventually collected, and the theives lives ruined, could be much more.

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...s-lawyers.html

"So all in all, for a 3 year period, they spent around $64,000,000 in legal and investigative expenses to recover around $1,361,000."

Imagine what could have been accomplished by spending $64M to rethink their business model.

Oh they will do that eventually, but it will take a few bankruptcies before they wise up.

Interestingly, anyone read how Prince has been combating piracy (at least in the UK, not sure if he does this worldwide)? Rather than selling his albums as CDs/downloads, he sells the rights to a national newspaper, who give the CD away as a free gift in the paper. He gets a lot less than he would if he sold the album, but he times the releases to coincide with his tours, and reckons that he makes more on the extra ticket sales the free CD creates than he looses in the profits from CD sales!

Now that is thinking outside the box, but to get big corporations to think about similar solutions to save their arses will take until several have gone bankrupt using the current model.