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Originally Posted by nekokami
I think you're arguing against yourself here. 1) Not all streaming sites are any more legal than eMule and its ilk,
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But there also an abundance of legal sites out there. Here in Germany you can listen to almost every radio station online - legally of course. In the U.S. the situation is not much different.
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and 2) recording off the radio was never especially legal (at least in the US),
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I work for an American radio station and had a discussion about that topic with someone from our station some time ago. He told me that it has of course be legal to record music from radio on cassette tapes and still is. Back in 80s the music industry tried to convince Congress that they needed tougher laws against music "piracy" (read: recording on tapes). They weren't successful. It remained legal.
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And most of all because analog copies tended to be fairly poor qualities and copies of copies would degrade rapidly, limiting black market distribution.
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This is exactly the point. Paper books as well as analog tapes have a built in copy protection. You can copy them only with a lot of efforts or just a few times. Digital media can be copied an unlimited amount of times. Thus it needs some type of "artificial" copy protection to have the same level of protection as paper books and analog media have.
BTW: There is a school directly in front of my office window. During breaks there are hundreds of students outside the building. I guess about 75 % of them are using an mp3 player or at least have one with them. If we would ask them how many of the songs on their players are legally obtained, what to you think would be the result? I think 10 % for iPod user and 2 % for all other would be a good number. But maybe I'm a little bit too optimistic here.
Alan