When I sat in the court room on 9 March this year to hear Golden Eye International's case for obtaining a Norwich Pharmacal Order to allow it to get the personal details of O2 customers it said were illegally downloading its films, I was pretty sure they would win.

Mr Justice Arnold is known to be sympathetic to rights holders who are battling illegal file sharing. He has after all been instrumental in setting precedent which is now forcing major ISPs BT, Talk Talk, Sky and pretty soon Virgin Media to block access to Newzbin2 website.

The only amusing thing about this case is the publicity boost given to Newzbin2 because so few ordinary people in the UK had even heard of it. And listening to Mr Justice Arnold  earlier this month,I got the strong impression that he felt that Golden Eye was putting forward a pretty strong case on behalf of itself and Ben Dover Productions.

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With the news that Andrew Crossley has been banned from practising law for two years, plus Golden Eye, yet another firm engaged in speculative invoicing failing to convince a judge of the merits of its cases, is this the end of speculative invoicing?

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I got an email this weekend pointing out that my Spotify subscription had lapsed because of a payment problem. As my debit card expired at the end of May, that was no surprise. I'd been in two minds about whether to continue the subscription as I'm house hunting at the moment and every penny counts. At £5 per month for the basic premium service, it's not really much and my temptation to cancel probably had more to do with boredom at my collection of playlists.

Office music, delivered into well-shielded headphones, is an important part of my job - the music enables me to concentrate on proof-reading pages or working on projects without the distraction of the background hubbub that characterises an office full of journalists.

The beauty of Spotify is the chance to instantly wrap your ears around pretty much anything, so I decided to have a listen to some of the seminal albums of the past, which I'd simply never got around to listening to before. If that didn't grab me, then Spotify would be history.

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So Andrew Crossley, the man who once boasted his legal company was pulling in hundreds of thousands a year, is so skint he only gets slapped with £1,000 fine by the ICO.

Anne Muir, a 58-year-old grandmother from Strathclyde, on the other hand, who has never boasted about being rich, could be forced to pay a fine of thousands of pounds; plus get a criminal record into the bargain after pleading guilty to illegally downloading files to her PC.

It's difficult, really difficult to see the justice here. OK Anne Muir committed an offence. She should not have downloaded these files. But she wasn't apparently making any money from this. It was wrong yes, but ask any of the recipients of the letters sent by ACS Law, Crossley's firm, whether they think his actions were an offence against them. And he was certainly making money from them.

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The music industry has been trying to work out damages owed due to piracy for some time. To say their approach has been somewhat disorganised would be an understatement. Back in 2009, a woman from the USA was ordered to pay $1.92m for downloading 24 tracks from file-sharing site Kazaa - that's $80,000 per song. But it gets far siller.

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The best thing to come out of the ACS Law hearings about alleged copyright infringement is that  the spotlight is now on the inherently flawed belief that the sole use of IP addresses is acceptable proof someone is guilty of copyright infringement.

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