Milaka: From what I've heard, the MPAA have started to use Microsofts MP10 copyright protection as a means of monitoring the files that you play through it... AOL was rumoured (briefly) to be implementing something similar with WinAMP (MP10 and WinAMP are the most common media players used under windows)
Ecastic: If Initial D is licenced in America, it's licenced here too... ALL AMERICAN LICENCED MEDIA... If you were to download something like Doctor Who, that's a totally different ballgame, since it's British licenced media, and it's laws apply here too, seeing we are part of the Commonwealth.
Just because something is licenced doesn't mean that torrents won't run... Look at Windows, MS Office, Over 10,000 other different types of LICENCED games, movies, music, TV series. And even then, before the US laws applied here, we still had extremely strict software laws. These were:
$150,000.00 fine PER copied (NON legal backup - It's completely legal to have one copy of original media that you own, provided you can show proof of purchase when asked) Movie, and/or 2 years jail.
$2,500.00 fine PER mp3/wav/aac/yadayadayada, unless you can prove that you own the CD that the digital media file came from, or you purchased it online (Again, need proof of purchase)
$4,000.00 fine PER copied music CD (Not digital media) sold to another party (This also gets covered under selling/receiving stolen goods)
As far as I know, with selling copied movies, it's twice the fine ($300,000.00 per media item), AND 6 months jail per item.
This was correct at the last time I checked, over a year and a half ago (When I had 11,000 mp3s - Damn HDD failure
), and has probably changed now due to the new copyright laws (American ones) being enforced. The only major change is that businesses are now not immune to copyright laws (Before it was the practice of only the people actually involved being fined, now it's the company as a whole).
The Australian economy might be slowing down, but think about all the revenue that they'd make off enforcing this! Hell, the last three months has seen almost AU$2million in fines being passed down, most of them to stalls in Sunday Markets and the like (A 30ish year old woman got fined over $800,000.00 a few months back due to selling mp3/music CDs at the local markets, WA Police Computer and Information crimes department picked her up in a nice paddy wagon and took her away)
Hacker, no... Hackers are programmers, crackers break into computer systems... Common misconception
I actually do construction work, and I do have a shell, it's every other TTY window that isn't running X Windows, or the other computers over the last two years that I've purchased (I'm buying another one soon and going to talk to Live Evil about using it as a dump server, since the place of hosting does not recognise US LAW
)