Number of Lawsuits by the Recording Industry Against Its Customers: 4,280

From Law.com: "Is Suing Your Customers a Good Idea?" by Fred von Lohmann--

Four thousand two hundred and eighty lawsuits and counting.

That's how many lawsuits have been brought by the major record labels against music fans for using peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software (like Kazaa or Morpheus) to swap music over the Internet. . . .

[F]or the recording industry, the lawsuits are not simply about batting average and covering the lawyers' bills. The campaign, coordinated by the RIAA, was a last-resort maneuver by the industry to stem the tide of P2P file-sharing, which had reached mammoth proportions. In fact, some estimates put the number of American music swappers at 60 million -- that's 9 million more than voted for President Bush.

Unfortunately, the evidence thus far suggests that the RIAA litigation campaign has had little, if any, effect on P2P file-sharing. Companies like Big Champagne and BayTSP that track the online P2P population have found that the number of U.S. file-sharers continues to grow. The global file-sharing population, moreover, is skyrocketing.