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"because they can't stop us" is a very poor defense for behavior.

There is a flip side to that, though. A person who has access to a technology that could lower his exposure to theft, and does not use it, at some point loses the right to spray the cost of his problem all over the rest of society.

If I'm a car dealer, and I leave my cars unlocked with the keys in them every night when I leave, I will have many cars stolen. Let us stipulate that every single person who took one is a car thief, and a dirty rat. However: for how long do I get to run the police and the courts around in circles, at taxpayer expense, dealing with all these car thieves, when I have a reasonable step I could take to greatly reduce the thefts? My insurance company will be asking me the same thing.

The RIAA is attempting to push the costs of its own refusal to adopt a widely-available, lower-cost distribution technology, onto the rest of us. They want the courts, the police, the ISPs, the public (if they ever get their "tax" on CD-burners) and anyone else they can think of, to absorb all kinds of costs to take care of this "theft" problem they have. They are like the car dealer above, who wants the police and the courts to continue responding to a problem he could ameliorate by taking a reasonable step. It is not fair for them to do this. What these guys want to do is holler "Thief! Thief!" and have the rest of us jump through hoops while they do nothing about an obviously superior, lower-cost distribution technology that they could have had running by now for less money than they've spent on lawyering and lobbying. They are stealing from us, burning up court time, making Verizon spend money on their problem, on and on, instead of doing what every other business has to do when a lower-cost production technology appears: adopt it or die. The fact that there are "thieves" in this picture is a distraction. The real problem here is a bunch of unreasonable business people who are fighting the tides, and now they want to pass the bill to us. I say 'no'.

The RIAA has tried using technology to limit theft (such as CDs that computers aren't supposed to be able to read)- it just hasn't been terribly successful.

More importantly, you speak as if online distribution is a proven method of reducing piracy, which it isn't. If distribution goes online, people who have never downloaded music before will get a taste of it- and then they might realize that they can do it for free. The theives aren't a distraction, they're the cause of the problem.

What people are doing now, in terms of your analogy, is stealing cars en mass from all over town, whether they are locked or not.