I agree with you, Eric, in a sense. Turning people on to new music is great. We used to do that with tape all the time. What we DIDN'T do is copy entire albums and pass them around. Maybe others did and we were naive morons. I don't know. What we did was make "samplers" of various artists in order to introduce friends to artists we had discovered, not providing a copy an individual album in it's entirety.
I have burns of a few OOP discs on my shelf. I have burns of concerts on my shelf that weren't authorized by the artist. That's two strikes right there; I'll be damned if I'm going to take a third strike by lying to myself and others and pretending that it isn't illegal or unethical. Jeez, fess up, guys...