Hi, yeah, I am still in midterm mode. The school year is different because I attend a private college and they are woefully disobedient of normal conventions on holidays or the begin and end of the school year.
There are many reasons against copyright laws in the current form. One of these reasons is, that sharing music helps the artists (better concert attendance), the consumers (free music, yay!) but not the intermediates. there are labels who understood this by now. Magnatune being a great example and Jamendo another one (jamendo is not exactly a label but sufficiently similar).
People liken intellectual property to real property, but I think this is not a valid comparison. If I give you an apple and you give me an apple, we both have one apple, if I give you an idea and you give me an idea, we both have 2 ideas. Sharing does not 'deplete' the immaterial resource. The use of terminology from the material world is more or less a tactic of the intermediates to muddy the waters so that people don't see what really is occurring: the exchange of ideas where no one actually loses anything. Since most of the time, the price of CDs seems to be prohibitively high and there is a huge uncertainty about the quality of the music on it (There is a related paradox: the price of a piece of information can only be evaluated if you know it already, but then you would no longer want to buy it), downloaded files do not equal lost sales. More often than not it is the other way around: After you stumbled upon an awesome song on the internet and downloaded it, you are more likely to buy the CD. I would never expected something good behind the name Timid Tiger, but after I DLed the song "Combat Songs and Traffic Fights" (legally, btw, since their label understand the modern market) I decided to buy their album.
So, yeah, the view of copyright by the RIAA, MPAA and similar organisations is deprecated and detrimental to the success of the artists.
