Originally Posted by Lenny2

There's always been some way that people in the know could get all the content for free...in the early days it was the newsgroups.

I think what's tipped the scales though is that google is showing torrent results in the SERPS, so now joe six pack is finding out about torrents because when he searches for "milf hunter" or whatever, torrent sites come up first.
It used to be just the uber geeks that were stealing, but the numbers are growing exponentially.