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Gideon, you are really all over that betamax case, but you miss the point.
The judges ruled for VCRs and against the movie / television companies mostly because the potential hard done was small. First off, if you are recording stuff off the air (which at the time was about the only way to do it, no sats and few cable channels) it wasn't an issue because all your friends had initial access to the same thing. Secondly, most people didn't mail tapes to hundreds or thousands of people all over the world, but at worst would lend a tape or two to their best friends. The judge's ruling was based in a large part of the large potential for good use versus the limited potential for true widescale abuse.
Movie copying came later, and for the most part wasn't a big deal because the cost to get into copying was high, and the quality of the second copy was so low that few people would replicate down the chain. VCRs are a very lossy format, and every copy lowers the playback quality significantly.
The problem today comes from the digital nature of the products. A copy isn't just a poor quality duplication, but in fact a bit for bit copy, an exact duplicate. The duplicate can be duplicated and all of it's duplicates are exact copies again.
But, in the long and the short run, the betamax case has essentially NOTHING to do with torrents.
Why?
Nobody puts up, seeds, and tracks a single file only to share with their 2 friends. Torrents are put online to create widescale distribution of copyrighted material without restriction. It isn't used to give you neighbor a copy (it would be much faster and easier to burn a disk and hand it to him) but rather to allow tens of thousands if not millions of people to download and profit from the product without the rights to do so.
Putting up a file on a torrent site is, by itself, an act in violation of copyright, unless you have specific rights to do so (IE Creative commons license).
So now, how would anyone in the world know about your stolen file if you just created a torrent and sat there and did nothing with it? Nobody would. In order for the distribution to happen, you require torrent sites, trackers, and the like so that people can find your singular file. Without mechanism of publication, there would be no spread of copyrighted material without permission.
Thus, the torrent trackers and search sites are defacto partners in crime. Without your file, and without their systems, there would be little or no spreading of the material.
product + distribution is required to make this happen. Without distribution, none of it would be possible.
"torrent files" as a protocol or a process are not illegal. But clearly, sites like TPB that know that the sources of these files (unless sourced in Sweden, apparently) are illegal, shouldn't be listing these files. They are direct partners in the process of stealing the content. Without them, the content would not be stolen (at least not to any great level).
That is why the whole Betamax ruling is entirely irrelevant to this discussion, just a pointless piece of drivel put up by someone who profits grandly from stealing other people's content.
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