An article in the Guardian illustrates the mainstream's growing frustration at the continuously ridiculous attempts by the RIAA to constrict, terrorise and undermine P2P networks and their users. One point, though, is out of touch with reality (though might have been true a few years ago before laptops got truly portable and iPods got decent sized storage) - "no music fan would rather have an MP3 file than an 'official' CD". Count me in opposition to that one - when I moved across two borders a couple of months ago there was no way I was carrying 300-odd CDs (when they were all stored on hard drives anyway). I left them behind, in the care of a relative - and won't be buying any more in the forseeable future. I'd like to give bands money for their MP3s sometimes, but they'll have to settle for the proceeds of concert tickets and T-shirts until their erstwhile recording association gets its arse in gear. Some of my CD money went to EMusic, some of it's going on software, and some of it's paying for broadband (hence the plans for compulsory licensing).
One interesting thing, now my EMusic subscription's lapsed and my CDs are in another country, is that I have no way of proving that I've already paid for songs I might re-download (at a better encoding bitrate, for example) and ergo, 'the police' have no way of proving that I haven't already paid for tracks I download. The RIAA are planning to sue the uploaders - those who make large libraries available - rather than downloaders, but can they truly say that uploading a file to someone who's already paid for it is a breach of copyright. If I interpreted correctly, it's supposed to be illegal to copy tracks from your CDs into another format (eg MP3s) even for personal use, but that's been blown away years ago. There aren't many stones left to look under.