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Finally, we note that the RIAA's survey was conducted before it filed its 261 lawsuits -- and before newspapers started sensationalistic stories about defendants like Brianna LaHara, a sympathy-inducing seventh grader from New York who settled the RIAA's suit for $2,000.

It's one thing to be supportive and understanding when a pollster asks you how you feel about the RIAA "gathering evidence and preparing lawsuits against individual computer users who are illegally sharing substantial amounts of copyrighted music online." (That's a quote from the RIAA poll's script.)

But it's a whole different matter when you're asking people to applaud more vividly described, explicit actions by the RIAA, such as its lawsuit -- subsequently dropped -- against a retired schoolteacher who says the RIAA erroneously accused her of sharing Snoop Dogg files.

We suspect that the postlawsuit news flow has had some sort of effect on public support, but the RIAA doesn't have any postlawsuit research yet, says a spokesman.

Fast-forward to the recent Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing data, which, like the RIAA's research, was gathered in prelawsuit days. Earlier this year, Gallup found that roughly the same percentage of teen-agers admitted to cheating on a test or exam (48%) as said they downloaded music from the Internet (47%) -- presumably illegally, given the limited legal options at the time.

Yet when asked about the morality of these activities in August, teen-agers saw a huge divergence. "Next, I'm going to read you a list of issues," went the script. "Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, for each one, please tell me whether you personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong." Only 18% said cheating on tests was morally acceptable. But "downloading music from the Internet for free"? Eighty-three percent said it was OK. In fact, teens found free downloads more morally acceptable than they did divorce, gambling or nonmarital sex between a man and a woman.