What irks me most is that they are now targeting downloaders. The situation is trickier than targeting uploaders since downloaders may be oblivious of the content until they finish download it. However, just by initiating the download, the downloader are subject to this law already... You can simply trick someone to download some illegal content, telling them that it's a homemade video for instance? And copyright holders have been known to have a history of overreaching copyright, targeting people who download legitimate contents. Definitely the law can be used as a tool to persecute people.
In Japan now, universities totally ban torrents, immediately shutdown the network if they detect any torrent traffic. I find this very stupid since there are many legitimate torrents, like linux distros. But well, people are just super paranoid about anything related to torrents these days. Even the P2P is a taboo word in many laboratories AFAIK.
And this kind of stupid law is not the end yet. The lobbyists here are pushing for the law to install network sniffers at ISP level to detect copyright infringement before they reach the internet. This, however, is crazy since that same sniffer can be used to sniff out people's traffic - a big violation to privacy. Unless there is anyway to legitimate access HBO and whatnot without waiting for a year, I'm gonna go with torrent.
Sad me!
