The court can't just jump up and say "We don't like that, it goes out." They have to follow procedure which means a challenge has to appear in front of them. That challenge can also only be brought by someone with standing, meaning that this law had a negative impact on you somehow.

That's one of the reasons the government loves the secret gathering so much, makes it harder for it to get challenged. If you can't show this harmed you, then you can't fight it in court.

So someone has to be impacted by this, challenge it, and it has to be appealed up to the SC. Then and only then do they rule on it.

It seems like his lectures are about 1000x more awesome than what I had to sit through in school, so you'd think they'd keep those and just make sure he's out of a position where he is interacting with students on MIT's behalf, which it sounds like he did voluntarily some time back. Kind of ridiculous to eliminate a person's work because he did bad things. How many of us read Moby Dick in school? Herman Melville was not a good man, but we ignore that, and focus on his work.

The best thing MIT could do is release the lectures for free (i.e. remove a profit motive from themselves), eliminate their name being used in association with it, and step back. That's reasonable. Trashing the whole thing is silly.

Seeding has always been where the real legal risk is, even before torrent when people were getting stuff from IRC bots, "secret" FTP sites, etc. The person hosting the file hosts all the risks, and relatively few people can make such things work, and those that do want to limit their audience for a variety of reasons. Torrent eases this a bit in that it forced people to seed at least as long as it takes to download, although I think even that has gone away.

Warezing will live on forever in the old style of warezing networks and word of mouth, it's far too expensive to police effectively, and easier for the public to defund adequately. What TPB did: show the seeders to all the world in a public way, probably won't live. It makes it far too easy for various interested parties to find offenders without having to spend any money. The general public cannot defund law enforcement to that degree (and probably shouldn't, copyright has some limited value) and certainly can't stop civil suits.

I might too, but that doesn't make us right.

It is called Software Assurance. Been doing it for quite some time.