[US Copyright Register Marybeth] Peters believes that many "fair use" practices consumers take for granted, such as taping a TV program or copying a magazine article, need to be re-evaluated in the digital age because the economic harm to copyright owners is far greater. For instance, she believes song-swapping over the Internet, popularized by Napster, is illegal.-- Library official at center of digital rights fight"Some of the activities you tolerate in a nondigital world are because of the inefficiency of making the copy, how the copy is degraded and the difficulty in sending copies to someone beyond yourself," Peters said. "All of those things go away in a digital environment."
Funny how there are no simple answers in the copyright reform debate, unless you take a radical position to completely ignore the other side's concerns. (I'm talking about you Messrs. Valenti and Stallman.)
I'd say about 80% of my mp3 collection is my own stuff and it sounds the best - mostly because I use a good program (Ripenc in BeOS using LAME) and a the highest quality bitrate - space be damned.
