I'm doing the exact same thing kcarlile. No cent of my music purchases goes to the RIAA.
I tried to keep my first comment value-neutral, but if you want to talk about this...
Where does copyright come from and what is its purpose? The power congress has to grant copyrights comes from Article 1, Section 8: "Congress shall have the power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
If we accept what the constitution says, copyrights exist not for the artist, but our society. You only "own" a song you wrote because that might encourage you to make more songs. This is actually the only place (to my knowledge) that they included the purpose, or aim of how they gave power. Maybe they were afraid of the crazy (in both scope and duration) copyrights and patents that happened anyway in our time. There has been a lot of bad stuff pulled by the RIAA (and the MPAA, but less so now), but that's another lengthy post.
I'm not against you getting your investment back in creating songs, but I think we can get a little overboard when we try to 'own' things like ideas, songs, phrases, and so forth, as we would 'own' a house, a piece of land, a fence, et cetera.
The supreme court has ruled that Copyright Violation is not equatable to theft. That we keep calling it that is mostly due to RIAA propaganda.
I'm not aiming to convince you that downloading copyrighted music is above any sort of criticism, or that you shouldn't have rights as a creator (I would say the constitution gives the reason for the rights), but I would like people to recognize that the issue is not a closed book. Far from it.
