I am disgusted as well by the RIAA. I feel the record industry had a great ability to use the peer to peer network; instead they dropped the ball, and pissed off their fan base. I do not think that record sales are being dropped (especially to the degree they claim), more that a lot of new music is crap.
There is a great program called peerguardian 2. You can find it at
http://methlabs.org/projects/ this program is designed to block the RIAA and the companies they hire to connect to your computer while using a P2P program. While I cannot say it is perfect I think this would remove a good portion of any danger of being caught by the RIAA.