Excellent point. Things have needed to change, I don’t think anyone will disagree there, but the point seems to have been completely missed by many, particularly those in stark opposition to the freedom of information. I believe it is the media corporations who must make changes to affect this outcome and it should not be handled in a legal manner but instead by methods such as the gaming industry have adopted. “Increase the value and incentives to be a legal, paying user”. There are so many other options available to them besides bringing lawsuits against end-users or providers such as the TPB website, yet they seem to only have that one card to play no matter what the situation.

There are also some important legal implications which support the need for open availability of free content such as the Fair Use Provisions Act of US Copyright law. The many other arguments for the need for availability of copyrighted content also include, but are not by any means, limited to:

1) Users who live in a country with no supporting copyright laws. For these users, outright piracy for private use and even in some cases, profit, is legal.

2) Users outside the intended areas of legal distribution. Though legally questionable and still subject to local copyright laws, it is undoubted that a majority of people support that this also should be considered legal. Making purchase impossible leaves a user who is being denied access to content based of geographic location and leaves piracy their only alternative.

3) Anyone who has taken an activist-like stance against the content providers and would use the materials as part of their campaign against them as part of a boycott or other such action.

For US citizens wishing to use the material for: “purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” The download and exclusive possession of copyrighted materials for any of these easily provable motives is 100% legal. It is not theft by any means, and any assertion that it is, provided it is under these provisions, should be considered a case of libel and direct defamation of the target’s character. Legally speaking, all one must do is publicly comment on the content for any act of piracy to be protected under Fair Use.

While not openly supporting piracy for the sole ideal of “collecting it all for personal use”, I do believe that even without torrents, the media must still otherwise be made available to the public domain for any of the above purposes. Torrents are the current user-provided outlet for this media, and so long as the individual user in possession of the copyrighted material can justifiably support the possession for any these purposes, it it legal, is not theft, and anyone asserting otherwise should be considered an uneducated fool who is not in full possession of the facts.

The RIAA nor MPAA have publicly responded to this. The process by which they are willing make available any requested content has been made so difficult and time-intensive as to render it almost completely useless as a source for most if not all of the above cases for the free distribution of said content. It should logically be assumed that they are willing to strip the right of users to use their copyrighted content for any of these purposes, as they have made no attempts to provide an outlet for such materials to be made readily available to any and all individuals or groups seeking said materials for such purposes. The act of denying the materials to users for these purposes is just as illegal as downloading the content illegally for piracy is.