When are you guys going to wake up and use newsgroups? BitTorrent is a huge liability if you ask me. If you're caught and sued, it's for distribution — not downloading.
For the most part, Usenet operators (e.g. EasyNews, GigaNews) would end up being the ones targeted.
1. Most of them seemingly don't keep any logs of who downloads what, so the most info they have on you is: address, name, credit card, volume downloaded per month.
2. All of the prosecutions thus far for file-sharing have been for distribution. The pre-BitTorrent lawsuits were over files shared on Napster, LimeWire, Gnutella, etc. The more recent lawsuits over BitTorrent downloads are due to the BitTorrent technology which has you uploading and downloading at the same time, thus by participating in a torrent you are aiding in the distribution of it.
3. In addition, some Usenet providers provide NNTPS connections, thus (virtually) eliminating the ability for someone (i.e. ISP) to inspect what you were downloading from the server.
4. It might be possible to get sued for downloading something from Usenet, but the likelihood of extreme damages awarded by the court is pretty small. The most likely reason that someone would be sued in this fashion would be to prod them into taking a $2k-$3k settlement offer to avoid the hassle (and cost) of defending the case in court. If someone were to battle such a case through court, it would likely turn out in their favor (though IANAL). Though the cost of getting to that point would likely be higher than the settlement amount. So basically, such cases would be even more like Mafia shake-downs than they are now.
Though, none of this speaks to the recent push to criminalize copyright infringement. I have no clue if that would only cover downloading, distribution or both (or what the penalties would be).
