The recording industry has sheeplishly admitted that it paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million to chase only $325,000 worth of piracy cases. The RIAA said that it managed to get $3,900 from each pirate and only 100 settlements for the entire year.

It was better than the year before where the recording industry wasted $21 million on legal fees, and $3.5 million on "investigative operations" ... presumably MediaSentry. And recovered just $515,929. The year before it was $19,000,000 in legal fees and more than $3,600,000 in "investigative operations" expenses to recover $455,000.

In the three years since the RIAA declared war on P2P pirates it has spent $64,000,000 in legal and investigative expenses to recover around $1,361,000. They would have been more likely to get their money back if they had stuck the whole lot on a horse.