A fair way to promote fair use?
or a mean way to enforce copyright law?

Tapes have been around for years, and they have always been a fact of life for the music industry – and have never really had much impact on CD sales, nor tape or vinyl sales due to the generally low quality of duplications in comparison with the original. With the advent of digital media came a significant problem – MP3s. The MPEG Layer 3 sound compression algorithm allowed very high quality copies to be made of large sound files, squeezed into a fraction of their original size.

To give you some idea, a 60Mb WAV file ripped direct from a CD can be stored almost losslessly in 10% of that space using this technique. This meant that people could share the music illegally at very high quality, very….very easily.