RIAA: $16 Mill legal fees
By Sameer

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) represents companies that manufacture and distribute 85 percent of all the music sold in USA. It is also tasked with certifying if a music CD has sold enough to be awarded Platinum and Gold awards.

The RIAA spends a large part of its budget and resources in fighting piracy on the internet.

Most of the legal cases initiated by the RIAA are more about public education and deterrence rather than recouping profits lost to pirates. The idea is to track down the IP address of a few people who have downloaded pirated music and then publicly warn them and/or take them to court.  The media coverage would result in deterrence to other pirates. Sometimes, the plan backfires when dealing with the culture of free on the internet, but that is a discussion for another article.

Recording Industry Vs People blog is reporting how the RIAA paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 in 2008 to recover only $391,000!

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The RIAA's "business plan" is even worse than I'd guessed it was.

The RIAA paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million, to pursue its "copyright infringement" claims, in order to recover a mere $391,000. [Ps there were many other law firms feeding at the trough too; these were just the ones listed among the top 5 independent contractors.]

Embarrassing.

If the average settlement were $3,900, that would mean 100 settlements for the entire year.

As bad as it was, I guess it was better than the numbers for 2007, in which more than $21 million was spent on legal fees, and $3.5 million on "investigative operations" ... presumably MediaSentry. And the amount recovered was $515,929.
“

It is the same story in India.  If the copyright enforcement raid is successful, tip of the local news organization.