Laws make sense and are enforceable only if they don't prohibit activities we do every day. A law prohibiting taking showers wouldn't make much sense because people need to shower. In that case, people would take showers and risk being arrested, as the necessity for a shower is greater than the fear of arrest. In this article via Boing Boing, John Tehranian writes for the Utah Law Review on the disconnect between what we do everyday with intellectual property and what is being outlawed by rights-holders. Tehranian says that the demands of rights-holders are ridiculous, and if the law were enforced 100% of the time, we would all be liable for millions of dollars' worth of copyright infringement:

There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say.

Have you ever whistled a song in public? Copied an email or article without attribution? You've committed a crime. Bad laws turn otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals for no good reason. Strengthening copyright laws isn't better for society and it certainly doesn't increase a content provider's likelihood of continuing to provide you with content in the future. It just nets them money from lawsuits. If the RIAA were really concerned about infringement, they wouldn't have a settlement hotline. Instead, they function like the Mexican police ("How much you got?"), settling for whatever people have instead of what they are "legally" entitled to.