Just to place my stance clear - I'm no advocate of piracy, I believe in general copyright law (though the US-disney extensions are getting a bit crazy). With that said I also release a lot of stuff into public domain.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here and setup a scenario.
When everything starts just going to the torrent and the world does nothing but get their stuff from the torrent without paying (assuming the copyright holder has decided, for what ever reason to not make it free), then there'll be no more money going into the industry, which will mean that possibly there'll be nothing new left to torrent
I believe that the content creators have a right to choose if their stuff goes for free or not and I do believe that should be respected.
Yes, the world wants access to their content online and with great ease, the world is begging for that - though the want does not justify piracy none the less. At the end of the day, we all want a pay cheque, we all want to be able to live a reasonable life doing what we do.
Paul.