Music piracy - opinions

[Perndog]

Given the famous file-sharing crackdown going on, I thought I'd share my opinion on the whole situation and see where everyone else stands. Do you think the RIAA is justified in going after people online? Do you have anything against downloading music or copying CDs, or do you go ahead and do it?

Personally, I blame the music industry's problems on people simply copying CDs rather than downloading them. A kid gets a new album for his birthday, then within a week everyone in the neighborhood has got it - from my experience in high school, this is far more common than downloading an entire album and burning it. I refuse to copy my CDs for anyone, and all of the discs I own I have bought. However, I have a collection of nearly 3500 mp3s on my computer (about half are rips from my own CD collection, the rest I downloaded) and willingly share it online out of gratitude to all the file sharers I got the songs from. I justify downloading so much by the fact that I have paid for the better part of 200 albums and I feel I've done more than my part to support the industry; I allow everyone to leech my files because, as I said, I think file sharing is a minimal threat compared to CD copying.

Thoughts?