IANAL, but my understanding is that, at least in the UK, it's still illegal to download. It's just that it's almost entirely pointless going after an individual purely for downloading. You could claim the cost of the individualy pirated item plus probably a few £ in damages - for a single movie, I doubt you'd get into triple figures.

But with uploading, you can claim a cut of every single download that other people could have done from your file. This can be run into many thousands of pounds per file.

The BPI's own FAQ seems to suggest that their case against downloaders is rather thin if existant at all. http://www.bpi.co.uk/digital-music/article/online-faqs.aspx

> Downloading is when an internet user obtains a digital music file from the internet in filesharing this source is another internet user known as an uploader. Unless this act of downloading is done with the permission of the record label (for example, from a licensed service like iTunes), it is unauthorised copying and is illegal.

Looks like their position is pretty clear to me - even if it's not worth actually prosecuting.

In only the narrowest sense.

- Since the content-as-property itself is intangible, you do not deprive anyone else of its use by downloading, hence you have not "stolen" anything.

- Since you did not legally purchase a license to the content, you are not bound to uphold its terms with the distributor.

HOWEVER,

- Your possession of licensed content without a license may constitute evidence of a criminal conspiracy, on your part and the part of the uploader, to defraud the distributor.

- If the material was only distributed in a form protected by DRM, then your possession of unprotected content may constitute evidence of circumvention, which is a crime under the DMCA.

Also, from an ethical standpoint, since somebody has to upload it, you're relying on someone else to take the risk of paying fines or going to jail in order for you to circumvent the intent (if not the effect) of the law.

Depends on your jurisdiction.

If you're downloading over SSH, can anyone really know what you're downloading? In other words, what's the likelihood of getting caught?

Over Usenet? Very unlikely that a casual leecher will get caught unless your ISP is doing deep packet inspection. Consuming Terabytes of data a month might arouse suspicion at your ISP, but that's regardless of Usenet or Bittorrent. 90% of good newsgroup providers offer SSL transfers these days anyways, but if someone is sniffing your line and inspecting your data, you have bigger problems than how to download the new Avengers movie securely.