I disagree.... These companies have found that going to court is not profitable at all - in Europe. In European courts, they are obliged to provide sensible proof of downloading by the individual concerned. If they fail, the court will make them pay the costs of the other part - and they fail a lot. Most of these companies have abandoned such activities as their "proof" was shown to be nonsense in several cases i.e. they accused the wrong people of downloading. In these cases, the threatening lawyers and their clients had to apologise to those they had wrongfully accused. Anti-pirate action has largely switched to lobbying to impair or remove Internet access from those accused of downloading. This is seen as a better option as they can simply accuse someone of downloading without the expensive and inconvenience of actually allowing the accused victim the EU-given right of defending themselves in a court of law. As a result, the newly passed French "three-strikes" law is likely to be kicked into touch as soon as someone challenges it in a real court. The smart option for the media companies/copyright holders would be to build business models that actually work for selling music online. Currently, they charge about the same for downloaded material as they do for physical products, despite the savings in manufacture, supply chain and retailer profits. Bulk subscription deals with ISPs are probably the answer. The big threat (to the big media companies) is that many music acts may start to sell their product online without any involvement of the big media companies.