Without getting into the morality of it, I thought that you might be interested to know that even in Canada where there has yet to be a law passed that accurately covers the downloading of copyrighted material, Big Brother is watching. As an ISP, every week we get lists from watchdog agencies that somehow monitor torrent sights and such. These lists contain literally thousands of IP numbers that have downloaded something or other. These letters generally ask us to do something about it but with no actual law banning the practice, we just archive the lists in case we are ever legally obliged to produce or act on them. They have a shelf life, but I won't tell you what that is.
For a while there, a law was moving through parliament but it was lost in the recent election. It was stupid anyways, in my own personal opinion, no matter which side of the fence you were on. It basically stated that for each IP address reported to to an ISP, we had to identify the user and mail or email said user to inform them that they were doing wrong. However, it still had no law to prosecute nor was any follow up action included in the legislation. Basically, all it created was a HUGE make work project for all ISPs that would have, in my opinion, very limited results.
Such a law would have made a considerable strain on resources for ISPs as these lists can total 7 to 10 Thousand IPs a month for us. Static IPS are easily identified but dynamic ones require searches through logs. The info is there, it just takes longer. In any case, how long before people got tired of hearing the cry of wolf and learned to ignore these letters?
Could you be stopped, blocked or booted from your ISP in Canada even without a law?
Technically, yes, but it all depends on how your ISPs "Acceptable Usage" policy reads. Technically, running a server goes against the "Acceptable Use" policy of our 'residential' internet service so we 'could' threaten, block or shut down every user using a peer to peer service. However, we wouldn't have many customers left would we? Still, if you are hogging bandwidth like crazy, hosting something that gets noticed as improper, or other infractions, we do have that option and have exercised in in some cases.
Anyhow, I just thought you might find it interesting that obviously there does exist a technology to watch torrent and other peer to peer services and the watchdog groups are indeed using it. Even if they can't touch you for now,
You Are Being Watched....... 
