In case you haven’t heard, the RIAA is now officially arguing in a court of law that ripping CDs to MP3 is illegal. This is a nightmare. For the record labels, I mean.

Do you listen to CDs? I don’t. I’ve got an iPod. CDs are bulky and inconvenient. The iPod fits in my pocket, and it holds all my music. I still buy CDs, though, because the music has to get on my iPod somehow. I could buy digital music directly from iTunes and Amazon, but I like having a physical, lossless backup. I could pirate music, but that presents ethical and legal issues. So I buy CDs.

But if ripping CDs is illegal… then what incentive do I have to buy CDs? If the RIAA is going to sue me for copying my CDs to my iPod, then why don’t I just pirate everything?

To put it bluntly, if ripping CDs is illegal, then that means CDs are now completely worthless to anyone who owns an iPod. And I hear that there are an awful lot of people out there who own iPods. In one fell swoop, the RIAA has managed to devalue the CD almost completely, and make piracy attractive to even the most honest customers. It is not an exaggeration to call this move an unprecedented disaster for the music industry.

But consumers don’t have to worry, because ripping CDs isn’t illegal. It was ruled legal in 1999 by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Recording Industry Association of America v. Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. The act of copying CDs to a computer or digital device for non-commercial private use, also known as “space-shifting,” was specifically cited to be part of the fair use privilege of the U.S. Copyright Act, and therefore legal.

In case you didn’t catch that, I’ll rephrase: The RIAA has already tried to argue that ripping CDs was illegal, but it didn’t hold up in court.

So why are they trying again? Well, in reality, this is a strong-arm tactic used by the RIAA to put a little fear into the defendant in this particular case. The real case is about file-sharing, not ripping. They’re trying to trump things up. Throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks, as it were.

But you could not ask for a worse message to send your customers: “Dear potential CD buyers, CDs are now worthless. You will have to find some other way to fill your iPods.” If the industry thinks CD sales are in decline now then wait and see what happens when the few honest customers they have left are driven to piracy by heavy-handed legal tactics like these.

What really needs to happen — and I know it’s a pipe dream — is for just one of the major record labels to drop out of the RIAA entirely. Stop paying them money. Sure, they won the first jury trial, but for all their legal bluster, music piracy is still going up year-over-year. They are wrecking your business. So why continue to pay them to do it?