A friend of mine was using LimeWire and recently removed it, relunctantly, from her computer. She had been paying for the pro version and thus assumed that it must be legal. Now she understands otherwise. The lawsuits scared her into realizing that there was a downside to file sharing. That's entirely the goal of the RIAA: set an example, generate a ton of press, and get through the thick skull of the existing file sharers that their behavior has a downside to it.

Their heavyhanded behavior is a direct result of KaZaA and friends making themselves difficult to sue. Now the RIAA is trying to educate the public. Getting Lars and company up there to do the P.R. mostly resulted in a barrage of articles about how records companies screw the little artist. Their current tactics are instead generating stories of 12-year old girls being sued. This plays nicely into their goals of educating people. If that girl could get sued, what about others? Now parents start paying attention. Somehow, the RIAA will continue to stay in business, despite the negative press (which, I believe, is exactly what they wanted).

Long term, we all know the correct answer is cheap, high quality, legal downloads. I figure the magic price is $10/month for all-you-can-eat with some caps to deal with massive downloaders (precisely what EMusic does for a one-year commitment). At that point, assuming you've got the same breadth of content (not present at all on EMusic), people will prefer the legit service, particularly because they can provide you with consistently high encoding quality and tagging, not to mention collaborative filtering and other fancy tools (likewise, not present in EMusic).