Does Fresh Equal Dangerous?

I read somewhere that the way the music companies protect their tracks is to pay specialists companies to go looking for file sharing. The business model is that the companies pay a fee per CD protected. It is a good sum of money, too much for them to be able to afford to protect their entire back catalogue.

I am guessing that CD’s get protected whilst they are being marketed. Whilst there are adverts in the media online protection is part of the marketing budget, but there is no marketing budget for last years CDs. I assume the same is true for the movies. It seems unlikely that any company is checking an entire share and trying to work out if any of it is there copyright.

So maybe the smart thing to do, is neither share or download the latest and greatest CDs or films, just wait a few months until the adverts disappear.

Is this theory right? I honestly do not know. What would be interesting is to see if there is any kind of pattern to who is getting busted and for what. I have not found a source of this kind of this information. Does anyone know of one? Has anyone got busted and care to comment?

It would be fascinating to know what content / countries / media is being targeted and how that shifts over time.