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I haven't seen anything that indicates the majority of sharers are overseas.

As for your hypothetical more than likely that song is in the public domain so it wouldn't be an illegal copy. Recording songs off the radio actually is a copyright violation (if the song is still copyrighted) but it represents so little activity the RIAA really doesn't care. I also have the option of going to used music stores, checking on Amazon very well might have given me a line to it used since they're hooked into e-Bay.

Of course most importantly your hypothetical is completely out of line with the situation. The majority of downloading isn't great old Garry and the Pacemakers tunes, it's modern top 40 albums on the charts today sometimes not even released yet.

I don't think anybody is of the opinion that it will go away. The problem is that the casual bootlegging that we all participated in during our youth has, thanks to modenr technology, expanded to levels never previously imagined. People have the mentality that this is just like tape-swapping in school but it isn't. You can now have thousands of copies of your album downloaded in just a couple of hours, as opposed to the one copy per hour(ish) of manual tape copying. The RIAA is reaping the rewards of their own casualness, a method of violation that they never worried about before is now able to outstrip the most productive swapmeet bootleggers.

It's true.. the majority of sharers are indeed overseas. The networks such as KaZaa and iMesh are based overseas, and the majority of files are based in either eastern Europe or the Far East. You can do some IP tracing to verify this, if you know what you are doing. Downloaders are primarily in the US. Since I don't listen to top 40 tunes, I primarily as I told another person, download tunes I have on cassette (of which I have hundreds) or on CD (to save time in ripping them myself) to make MP3 compilations for my two car stereos.