Copyright law has a distinction between commercial for-profit infringement, which is regarded as a criminal offense [cornell.edu] vs. noncommercial infringement which is regarded as a civil offense.
I think this distinction is useful, but it's one degree too severe. For-profit infringement should be the civil offense, and noncommercial infringement (consumer copying) should be fully legal [freepubliclibrary.org], just as rms is saying.
Why? Because copyright wasn't created to allow authors to impose a toll on every individual consumption of every individual work, otherwise libraries wouldn't have been widespread alongside early copyright laws.
Instead, copyright law was created to make sure the author of a work was the only one who had any right to make any profit at all off of their work.
Copyright law was created to ensure that someone could actually make a living creating new works. In the past you could achieve that objective by focusing on commercial publication because distribution was so difficult (your legalization of noncommerical infringement would have ruined that).
Libraries are an edge case that were allowed to exist because whatever you think of the law they worked out for everyone.
But now with the internet publication is trivial, so laws need to adapt. I don't think end-users should be subject to criminal penalties, but the people in the business of infringement? For sure that can be criminal if that's what it takes.
That's why file sharing should be legal, and business models should adapt to the decades-old reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable. Some businesses have adapted rather well. While it's unfortunate that DRM is widespread, things like streaming services aren't that bad an adaptation. They just need a bit more adapting to truly embrace the 21st century.
People like Kim Dotcom made a LOT of money file sharing. The only reason that streaming services are viable is that filesharing is still illegal. If your ideas were adopted then "noncommerical" protocols and services would just rip off every Netflix and Disney+ show out there and offer it all under one service for a small fraction of the price.
Great for consumers... until those companies go out of business.
Also, as a fun aside, one thing that baffles me is if for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense, as described above, then why aren't the major AI companies who commit mass copyright infringement with a profit motive in the training and development of their models being held criminally liable for their actions? The courts are currently twisting themselves into pretzels to try to invent some kind of fair use exception for them out of whole cloth because it feels wrong to charge them all with criminal behavior. But the truth is the law is not being interpreted in good faith, in part because the law itself is horrifyingly outdated and needs to be updated and modernized.
Because the AI companies are actually doing something quite different. It's not entirely clear how the laws apply to what the AI companies are doing, it's also not entirely clear how they should apply to what they're doing. Remember, the point of copyright law isn't copyright law, it's creating a fair and functionality economy surrounding creative works.
