Hi Dwayne-
My impression is that the "standard view" hasn't been uniform in time or space.
At the height of the RIAA's battle with Napster, I remember visits to my local public library, checking out CDs and ripping them. I don't recall the U.S. library systems being vilified at that time, and my results were dramatically better than the broken crap that was slow to download on Napster.
I think iTunes has done a lot to make the P2P process seem acceptable o big corporations.
In the future, when all media is owned by one corporation, the "free" aspects of certain parts of the system will be irrelevant. It won't matter that music downloads are free when you're making oodles from cable internet access charges. So the "piracy" aspect will disappear. Perhaps entities like emusic.com will end up like HBO: the downloads are "free," but you have to pay for emusic.com in some tier of bandwidth service from your DSL/Cable access provider.
I'm sure someone on this list will contradict/qualify: I understood that after auto leasing became popular, that auto company revenues shifted from car sales to the service department. Given that it was one big franchise, it didn't matter where the bucks were being generated, unless you were a salesman.
Best, Charles